


Early Frost

by fadeverb



Series: Waters [2]
Category: In Nomine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-29
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-19 05:31:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 48,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2376599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Unathi is looking to acquire a Word; one of its students is looking for a safe place to hide. Somehow, this is all going to end up being very inconvenient for Leo at his new job.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Seared Foie Gras, Nine-Spiced Venison, Grand Marnier Souffle

The candlelight flickered when the cook closed the door, then steadied. The windows were closed and covered, all the doors locked, and Unathi sat at the head of the table, as still as flames.

The table was set and the Habbalite was expecting a guest. Starting before its guest arrived would be impolite. Its guest was no stickler for etiquette, but that was no excuse for becoming sloppy. One could not revel in excess without an awareness of what was adequate, and how it could be surpassed.

Unathi waited as the minutes crept past the appointed hour. Its students would be quiet enough in the lower floors of the house, and all the mortal servants had been sent away for the night. There was no reason to be impatient.

Even if it might feel ever so slightly irked at the delay. But the prerogative of Princes was to take their sweet time getting to appointments.

A cadaverous man stood at the other end of the long table. He leaned forward, spidery hands laid on either side of the place set there. "Unathi," he said. "Did you miss me?"

"Always, Lord," Unathi said, and raised its wine glass in greeting. "Down to the pit of my stomach."

The Prince of Gluttony lifted the plate and ate its contents. He crunched through the china, the gilt of its pattern glinting off his teeth. "You want the Word," he said. "You want responsibility. I can smell the ambition from over here." He bit a chunk out of the table; splinters fell from the corners of his mouth. "You're burning for it under that slick candy shell. Would you say I'm wrong?"

"Never." Unathi picked up a fork to slide through the foie gras. Acceptable in every way, and no more than acceptable. It would have to speak with the cook about doing better. "I want to serve you with more power than I currently possess, Lord."

"You want more power," Haagenti said. He ate a second place setting.

"I don't see that these two goals contradict each other in any way."

Narrow fingers and bony arms spread across the table, and cracked it across. A third of the table fell down, its two legs insufficient for stability. (A metaphor, Unathi decided, and an appropriate one. Even an angel could only be so self-sufficient. Minions and masters both were necessary for thorough support.) The Prince ate handfuls of wood, tablecloth, china, venison. The souffle dish disappeared down his throat.

Unathi took up a knife, and sliced through the venison on its plate.

"I gave you distinctions," Haagenti said. Red wine dripped off his chin and his fingers as he advanced. "Attunements, vessels, artifacts. You want more?"

"Always," Unathi said. "Always and ever more."

Haagenti laughed. The candles went out. "Child of mine that you are. Do you aim to eat your own father one of these days? See if you can wrap your teeth around that?"

"If I meant to eat Princes," Unathi said, when it had swallowed that bite of venison, "there are others I'd butcher first."

Its Prince snapped out another three mouthfuls of table, and the middle legs went. The rest of the table plummeted forward; Unathi lifted its plate first, to hold for itself, fork raised, as wine and candlesticks fell across the floor. Just as well, then, that all the flames were out. The house was too old to have fire suppression systems installed.

"I appreciate ambition," Haagenti said. "It swells a demon up, like a funnel down the throat. You will get your Word, Unathi." He laid his hands on the Habbalite's shoulders, bony fingers pushing grease and wine into the fabric of its coat. "If you set your house in order. Can you do that?"

"Certainly," Unathi said.

Its Prince wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. "Then why haven't you already?"

When he was gone, Unathi laid its plate down on the floor, amid the ruins of the dinner.

So it had a runaway student to retrieve and punish, a stolen artifact to recover. Nothing outside its power, if it turned its full concentration to the matter. Unathi was quite sure it would find the one with the other.

Then it could become Ice, and explain to the world everything it hadn't understood before.


	2. In Which I Have A Perfectly Ordinary Morning

The green car has won the last five races in a row, and looks to be winning this one. It's a pulsing neon shade, a sort of aerodynamic blob that's hard to look at directly. No windows, no doors: it's the concept of a car that has nothing to do with human needs or purposes. It's the fastest thing on the track, and its purpose is to be that fastest object.

There are stands, because race tracks have stands. I sit in the front row, chin on my hands, probably the only real spectator in this crowd of figments. But how would I tell? Short of punching the people around me until I find someone who resists, anyway. And that seems needlessly antagonistic. I'm not here to harass ethereals or break their furniture. I'm here to watch a race.

I'd rather be in it. But that would be cheating.

A blue car, pale as sunlit water, jostles with the green for position, but never pulls ahead: the pack crosses the line one last time, and blue's in first again. I stand up with the rest of the crowd while the inarticulate roar sweeps down. We form a single unit of approval for the winner. The other cars are already slinking away, some of them shifting in form the moment they leave the track. It imposes its own logic on its racers; if I were brash enough to line up for the race, I wouldn't look much like myself.

I don't look much like myself as it is. I'm wearing the image of a vessel years gone, which looks nothing like my current primary vessel (taller, sharper, rather better dressed) or my soul (three spinning rings of fire, you know how it goes). No one gives me a second look when I shove my hands in my pockets and leave the crowd, the stands, to go stand by the edge of the track.

Not a one of the racers gives me a second look.

Two dozen races tonight, and no one ever did. So it's not that I'm surprised. I just keep up some hope. As Orlaith would say, it's nice to have long-term goals.

On another plane of existence, my phone's alarm goes off.

#

I open my eyes. Ceiling above, right where it's supposed to be. A cat with notched ears lies curled up on my chest, one paw flexing thoughtfully towards my face.

"I'm awake, Nik."

The cat leaps off my chest, and I roll out of bed. Some days I wonder if morning people world are just celestials who don't actually need to sleep. Surely we can't be _all_ of them.

Well, I should ask a Mercurian some time. They'd know better than I would. Something to do the next time one passes through the Tether and decides to come say hello to those of us who work just off-site. (The Tether locus being located in the middle of a busy port does wonders for obscuring people coming and going, and nothing good for having offices right on top of it. We manage.) Meanwhile, I have a breakfast to eat--it makes the Role a little more solid--and the rest of the morning routine to get through before it's time for work.

I like my morning routine. It's informed by the sorts of things humans do, but no one _told_ me how I should set it up. I'm still not quite used to the range of casual freedoms this job gives me.

Dawn's solidly broken by the time I hit the trail. It's mostly dog-walkers and other runners at this time of morning; the tourist stroll doesn't arrive for a few more hours. I set a brisk, human-reasonable pace (and it's not as if I could really do better, Ofanite or not) and give the trail exactly as much attention as needed to avoid plowing into other pedestrians.

There's nothing about my vessel that requires exercise by maintenance. But I like the running. It's enough skill to be satisfying when I do it right, and enough instinct that I can let my mind wander. After spending the night in the Marches, it's also a way to check back into the corporeal. This body, this plane of existence, this Choir that I've picked up...

I still like fast cars. But a car's not the same as a body, no matter what Kyriotates may say.

The river parallels the trail, or vice versa, for at least four miles; I take in two miles of that before turning around. Traffic's picking up on the way back, and the noise with it every time I pass beneath a road. If I don't get on the road myself within the hour, I'll be in bumper-to-bumper gridlock all the way to work. Someone ought to do something about that, but as no one's taking up my suggestions regarding public transportation expansion--it's not really our line of work, the Seneschal keeps pointing out, though I think letting Stone handle transportation just because it's related to cities is a cop-out of the highest order--I just leave for work early. Easier that way.

But really, Stone? Why people let them handle anything more complicated than rocks is beyond me. And exactly the sort of thing not to say in front of people I don't know well, as stated in my last performance review.

The hawk shadowing my run peels away when I get back to the apartment. Inside, Nik's still holding onto the cat, with one glance at me from the midst of her grooming. She's got a host to keep tidy; the damn cat doesn't seem to have figured out self-care yet, so we're handling it manually until someone figures out how to give a cat tongue bath instructions. I might have to outsource to Animals.

I get in and out of the shower in under five minutes, and dress in front of the big window at the balcony. (At five stories up, I'm not too worried about flashing any neighbors.) What this place lacks in size it makes up for in the view. This river may not be the most picturesque stretch of slow-moving mud that the world's ever seen, but it's _mine_ , and I like looking at it.

"How's traffic looking?" I ask Nik. Her tail twitches. "That bad? I need to pull my schedule back another twenty minutes."

She meows pointedly when I'm at the door; I backtrack and refill the kibble dish. Hosts do have their needs.

#

You'd think more people would question a big building labeled Farley & Sons Exports when it's smack in the middle of the continental US, give or take a few hundred miles. Shouldn't we be importing things? What's there to export from here that's not being sent out through other methods? But apparently we're an institution. There's even a gift shop on the first floor, though we share it with the city's river history museum adjacent to us. Great place to get replacement coffee mugs for those who drink coffee, I guess. The Seneschal keeps threatening to make us all wear novelty t-shirts on Fridays, but she hasn't followed through with it yet.

Nik lifts her coffee mug to me as I come through the door. "Seven minutes and counting. Was it the fender-bender on the bridge?"

"Got it in one. How's the situation at that warehouse?"

"They're dealing weed," she says, with a one-shouldered shrug. "And they're right idiots about it, or I never would've gotten suspicious. Local grown, so I don't see any reason to call down the wrath of cops on them. Maybe see if someone can have a word about them being more discreet?"

"It's not going to be me," I say, "but I'll see what I can do. Maybe we should let them stay. Keeps away real trouble if there's already semi-competent crime going on in the area."

"More of a misdemeanor, really," Nik says. "Maybe we want the real trouble to show up where we can find it, instead of continuing to elude us."

"You make a good point. I'll think about it."

"Think fast," Nik says, "because--morning, Justin. You're--"

"I _know_ ," says the receptionist, token Perfectly Normal Human for the building. He's one of those rare mortals who's aware without being Aware; remarkably in the know about the eternal secret war between Heaven and Hell, unable to hear disturbance if a War strike team popped onto the corporeal three feet behind him. "Don't you have an actual job? One in another location entirely?"

"It's my day off," Nik says. "Maybe you should both move to the other side of the river, if you're going to keep getting hung up on bridge crossings."

"Justin, do you know anyone who could warn some idiot weed dealers that they're being too obvious about it?"

"Not my scene," he says, and drops down into his chair with a dramatic sigh. "You want phones answered, I answer phones. Tourists redirected, I redirect them. Kyriotates hosted, I'm the man for you. But I do not wander into drug deals and make gentle suggestions."

"You could branch out," Nik says. "Pick up new job skills!"

I sling an arm over her shoulders. "Buzz me if anyone twitchy shows up and gets cagey about who they want to talk to? I'm expecting someone." And then I get Nik out of the reception area before that can turn into another pointless argument.

"You're having a morning," I tell her, once we're in my office. I set the security feeds from overnight to play out on my monitor, eight times the speed and only useful for watching for patterns. We haven't had any perimeter trouble since I got here, but it never hurts to check. "Something new, or is it the usual?"

"You could do other things at nights," she says. So. The usual.

"I could pretend to sleep, which is boring, or hang out in the Dreams side of the Vale, which is _also_ boring, because all of the interesting people tend to flee before they can be stabbed by Malakim. Why not do something useful?"

"If it wanted to be found," Nik says, "you would have found it by now."

"It's a big subset of reality. Such as it is. It's easy to get lost, and hard to find people."

"If it really wanted to be with you," Nik says, "it would have followed you back to the corporeal."

And there's a chance that she's right. She would've followed me to Hell if I'd asked, and Ferro wouldn't even come back to a place where it might lose its one vessel. She reads that as lack of loyalty. I read it as...I don't know. Being a pragmatic individual with a healthy sense of self-preservation, I guess. I was a demon, and how could it trust me to defend it once that stopped being in my own best interests? Best to walk away when everything was still good.

"I said that I would be back."

"Then it could have waited in that city for you. It's _gone_ , Leo. One way or another."

"Doesn't hurt to look." Which is going to get into the standard argument about the relative hazards of the Marches vs. the corporeal, neither of which seem all that terrible compared to the background threat level in Hell, so that doesn't usually go anywhere productive. "Speaking of looking around, can you take a rat into the warehouse and double-check that contents? It's possible the tip we got was for something real that's using the weed as a lower threat cover for what they're up to."

"Sure. Tonight's better, since the place is busy right now." The downside of Kyriotates: it's hard to distract someone who can multi-task that well. "When you're in the Marches--"

"You're watching out for me."

"But only _here_."

"If I get in danger in the Marches," I say, "I'll leave." It's not a promise. Just a prediction. "And if we have work to do at night, I'll do that instead, but until then, I'm going to keep looking. Would you feel better if you came along?"

Nik shrugs, and looks away. "Maybe not. I'd better get moving."

That wasn't kind of me. We both know she'd do terribly in the Marches. It's not her native environment, or a place she has experience in, or the part of reality that corresponds well to her Forces.

I watch her leave on the security cameras, live footage playing in real time right beside the recordings that zip along. Unkind, but possibly necessary. We've all got to learn to live on the corporeal in our own way, and I know that I don't do well with certain types of clinginess. There's a reason I have a Kyriotate bodyguard, and not a Cherub.

I'm not looking for someone to throw themselves between me and danger. I want someone who will see it coming, and tell me. Most of the danger I'm in from old friends isn't the kind that comes with bullets. A Cherub can't throw itself between me and what people might say to me.

#

My phone chirps at me. (The bird call ringtone was Nik's idea, but why not? Better than pop music.) Caller ID says it's Nahkal, which means I answer immediately rather than letting it go to voicemail while I catch up on my reading.

"I can never tell," I say, "if you're calling my phone or possessing it."

"I'm possessing the phone that's calling your phone," they say, "so it's somewhere between. How's work?"

"Fine. Slow this week." I leave my book at the desk to go lean against the window. Foot traffic picks up around this time of day, though the place won't be packed until lunch. That's when the food trucks pop up and all the tourists try to swarm the same place as the people who work here. It's a good reason to grab lunch at 10am or 2pm instead. "Did you ever catch up with that boat?"

"Ship, Leo."

"Ship. Thing that floats on water."

"Not yet, but I have a lead." Nahkal makes a thoughtful sort of sound. It's hard to remember, when they make such human sounds on the phone, that they don't spend much time in humans. I'm used to Kyriotates in general, but they picked up Lightning's attunement for the Choir a thousand years before I was made, so they keep showing up in...things. We had a discussion about possessing my books.

It's not that the Kyriotate was doing any damage inside them, but it's the principle of the thing. Phones are made for communication with living people in the present, books are made for communication with what someone said a long time ago. Not appropriate possession material except in emergencies.

"So tell me about the lead," I say, after a few seconds without follow-up.

"Nothing you can follow up on your end," they say, "unless--do you speak Portuguese?"

"I can order lunch in Spanish, and that's about it. Sorry. Why?"

"Just a thing in Brazil. Don't worry about it. I'm stretched thin these days, but that's no reason to get sloppy about work. Actually, I wasn't calling about the ship. There's a package dropping your way from upstairs, and I thought you'd like the heads up. It's not likely to get to you before the weekend otherwise."

And there's the disadvantage of the Tether locus sitting mostly in the river, and the Tether Seneschal spending most of her work hours in a piscine vessel keeping an eye on it. "Nothing water soluble, I hope."

"God, no. One of these days we'll work out how to get a waterproof phone to _charge_ underwater, and we can stop passing messages to the Seneschal by reliever."

"Some day, some glorious day. Anything else up?"

"Shedite infestation in New Orleans, but I'm on it. I'll shoot you that way if it gets out of hand. Catch you later."

"Later," I say, but the phone's already off. The Kyrio's chatty, but not one to linger.

They are also more or less my boss's boss, in a manner of speaking; the org chart around here is a little fuzzy at times. I report directly to our friendly underwater Seneschal, but mostly in the capacity of my Role, plus the occasional odd job when she has some security concern in the area. The rest of my time is available for Nahkal's use, but it's more like being on retainer than having another supervisor. Besides, the Seneschal reports to Nahkal as well. As one of the big Wordbound in Trade, they have at least four Tethers in their charge, plus Word promotion in general and whatever else catches their eye.

I'd be inclined to call them a workaholic, but I'm not sure a Wordbound Kyriotate can really be said to work _too much_. They don't seem to be burnt out by the load, and it's not my problem. They don't overwork me.

I end up leaning against the window while I read. The textbook's dry going, but I am a Trader now. The least I can do is put some effort into figuring out the basics of economics during my downtime at work.

#

I get back from lunch, making a personal vow to never try _that_ food truck again--not every food needs to be deconstructed, or fused to another type, much less both at once--to find the intern in my office with a package clutched to her chest. Sort of a neat trick, since there's not much package to clutch; it's smaller than my deconstructed taco was.

"I brought it to you," Olivia says, thrusting the box my way, "and removed the waterproofing but not the insides so it should be just fine and it's here before the end of the business day, also the Seneschal says someone has to do something about the trash situation by the harbor, I took a look while I was down there and she's totally right, anyway I should probably run soon since my class starts at two, how are you?"

"Great," I say, and take the package from her. "You're sure you're not going to fledge Ofanite?"

"Cherub," she says firmly. "I'm loyal and true and reliable and I keep very good track of everything I own and I'm always there for my friends, why do people keep asking that?"

"No idea. Thanks for running the errand for me. I owe you one."

"Freebie," Olivia says, just as firmly as before. "It's really no trouble, and this way the Seneschal doesn't have to keep track of little bits and pieces, which is some trouble with no hands anyway even aside from the river current, I'll catch you later!"

She bolts for the door. I watch the security footage to make sure she's safely on her bike before I sit down and open the package. She's the Seneschal's attuned, and I'd get deeply concerned messages from that direction if there was even a hint of danger. But she's also a reliever, and so we all keep an eye on her, one way or another. The corporeal is a dangerous place with a high mortality rate for its natives, much less visitors. And relievers are just--kids. You watch out for them. You take _care_ of them.

I will never get tired of the way Heaven pays attention to its children.

The box is one of those cheap artifacts whose only purpose is to be moved easily between realms; the waterproof package was probably more of the same, and now stowed away in the appropriate cupboard for reuse. Not really my business. Justin handles phones, tourists wandering into the wrong building, and office supplies; I handle external security in all its glorious variations. We had an extensive discussion last month about which category a squirrel invasion fell into, and I still say that once they're in the building and potentially useful to friendly celestials, they count as office supplies.

Anyway. I sit on my desk and open the box. There's a note inside, built on that cheap new artifact paper they've been using for interplanar communication. It lasts about six hours before crumpling apart. I'm not fond of that approach, but it's good for security and a lot cheaper than investing in proper paper, so until someone figures out how to hook Heaven up to the corporeal internet directly (God help us all when Lightning admits they know that one), this is what we're using. It says:

_And, as I am an honest Puck,_   
_If we have unearned luck_   
_Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,_   
_We will make amends ere long;_   
_Else the Puck a liar call;_   
_So, good night unto you all._

_I thought you might find these useful._

And then Penny's signature, with a quick sketch of a looped Seraph at the end. You could take it for nothing but a circle, if not for the few lines indicating wings and the six tiny dots of eyes.

He's sent me a pair of glasses. I slide them on, and blink through clear glass. No apparent visual effects, no shading, but it's obviously some sort of talisman. Now, given his Choir, and the quote attached... I'd guess that what I'm wearing will make me that little bit better at spotting lies told to me. A Seraphic gift, that. And the faint feather pattern on glasses' arms are a nice touch.

I swing downstairs to reception. "Hey, Justin, what did you do last Saturday night?"

"Wild night of debauchery," he says, not looking up from his computer. "Why do you ask?"

"Because Penny sent me a new talisman, and I want to see if I can tell when you're lying. It doesn't work if you're just sarcastic."

"I'm crushed to find that I'm not meeting your every need." He glances up. "Did that help?"

"Even the _question_ was sarcastic."

"Here, how about the next time someone calls up and tries to sell me toner, I forward them to you and you can practice on them." He waves towards my face. "Or you could take over reception, and see how many tourists you can scare away just by being a hipster at them."

"It's a talisman, not a fashion statement." I adjust my glasses; it's odd to have something sitting in front of my face like this, but they don't seem to be causing any difficulty with peripheral vision. "Besides, I've met real hipsters. My outfit doesn't qualify."

"Whatever you say, Leo. I'm just mortal. I don't try to understand angelic clothing choices."

Clearly I need to find someone who will actually lie to me if I want to figure out how well these glasses work. Maybe I should look up those weed dealers after all. "Just send up my afternoon meeting when he arrives, okay?"

"Will he be a hipster?"

" _Regardless_."

Justin waves me off. "I will make sure your nervous Outcast finds you, yes. And I'll buzz you if someone sticks his head in and then runs away without saying anything, too."

Now that's probably the truth.

#

I have a view. I have an office. I work with people I wouldn't mind having over for dinner, if I were the sort of person to throw dinner parties. No one's made a serious attempt to kill me, that I've noticed, in the last eight weeks. There's a wildly attractive Seraph of Trade who sends me presents and stops by for a date once or twice a month, and his friends mostly like me now that I'm on the right side of the war.

There's a voice in the back of my head that says it can't last. It's too good, and good things never last. Just look at what happened in the Marches, or at my last partnership, or the thing with my first girlfriend. Good things break for those who wait. Becoming an angel doesn't make good things _permanent_ , just...more common. Easier to access. A bit more reliable.

Maybe it can't last. But I'm doing decent work here on the corporeal, and it's going well so far. I will take it while I can get it.

And it's oddly satisfying, you know. Helping people instead of just taking their stuff.


	3. Taylor & The Abstract Concept Of Friendship

I was down to three real friends in the world, and not too sure about the third one, when I got the call. _Unathi knows where you are. Had to tell it. Sorry. Good luck._

The good news was that I was suddenly much more sure about the third friend; Secundum could have betrayed me long ago, and really should have. But there it was, giving me warning and Essence.

Celestial Tongues was my favorite Song. You can't even taunt someone with it, without doing them a favor at the same time.

"Are you even listening?" Taylor nudged me with one shoulder, his hands still wrapped around that coffee cup. "Did something happen? Did you see someone?"

"No, it's nothing," I said. "I was just thinking about my old boss. We're fine."

He glanced back over his shoulder. Then over his other shoulder, and stared for a long moment at a dogwalker across the street at the golf course. My second real friend, and most accessible one, had never learned how to be inconspicuous about his own paranoia. They must not have taught shadowing skills and their reverse in Heaven. Maybe in Heaven people sat around on little clouds, and they didn't have any proper streets or crowds at all. Nothing like Shal-Mari, the best city of Hell. The only city in Hell worth living in.

The worst part about being a Renegade was knowing I'd never see it again.

"The worst thing about all this," Taylor said, "is the--edginess. Not knowing. There's always someone just about to grab me. I can't deal with much more of this. I can't let it get any worse."

"Of course not," I said, and wondered why anyone would decide to become a Mercurian in the first place if they were going to get into scuffles with humans. _I_ never got into fights with humans, especially on the corporeal. They were the sweetest creatures around if you knew how to talk them into it. Unlike the damned in Hell, most living humans didn't even need to be Charmed to make that stick.

"So you understand why I have to go." He put the empty cup to his mouth, and sucked air through the lid. "I need a refill."

"Sure," I said. "Totally understood. Let's go together." Sometimes I wasn't sure if he'd picked up Paranoia when his Heart broke, like he always claimed, or if he actually had a caffeine addiction that ended up looking like the same thing.

"You _weren't_ listening." He flung the coffee cup into a trash can as we walked past yet another bus stop where we wouldn't be taking the bus. Break away from HQ, do something exciting, live for more than a few weeks: it was a _pick two_ situation. Neither of us had decided to trade life or freedom for excitement. Yet. "I talked to that bartender--"

"The Seraph?"

"Right, and she's been doing this--forever. She knows who to talk to. She told me who to call, and I've already worked it out. I'm going to do two weeks. Get this, this _buzzing_ down to something that won't make it all worse."

I wished for a drink of my own. Whiskey on the rocks, not even an expensive brand, but something young and rough that could knock me stupid. Stupid wasn't what I needed. It would've felt nice, and all sorts of things felt nice while being exactly the wrong thing to do.

"You'll be back?" I asked. "After you've spent your time with your friends." Better friends than me. Friends who could talk him into walking right back into the tedious trap of his old life. It would be exactly my luck if his old friends came after me next, and gave me two points to flee from. The Game wasn't much worry, as I knew for a fact my old teacher wouldn't report internal difficulties to _those_ bastards. But--two was more than enough. One was more than enough, when the one was Unathi.

"They're not my friends." Taylor nearly spat it out. "They're just--people. Who will let me use their Tether, on the recommendation of another, another _Outcast_ , even. You can't think anyone I knew before would let me come home. Or spend time around people like that."

"People like what?"

"Traders," Taylor said, and whipped around to glare at a pair of college boys with grocery bags. They didn't even glance at him, though I got one appreciative look as they walked right past us. My second-best friend either didn't know how to project anything more respectable than crazy-and-homeless anymore, or didn't care to try. It had never seemed like a good time to ask him which. "They're all--mercenary and nitpicking and they'll deal with _anyone_." He scrubbed his face with a hand. "Even people like me."

"But not like me," I said. "So they must have some standards."

Taylor laughed, short and unhappy. "I'm sorry. I don't mean anything like that. You've been good to me, and...I haven't been bad either, have I?"

"Not at all," I said, and put a hand on his arm briefly. I didn't like touching him for long; he didn't shower often enough. Having no permanent residence was no good excuse for neglecting basic corporeal hygiene. "I can trust you to pay attention to what's going on. I'll miss you for a few weeks, that's all. If you're not back in two and a half, I'll just expect you're not going to be back at all."

"I wouldn't abandon you." He smiled crookedly at me. "Not before I've even learned your name."

"As soon as I decide what to change it to, I'll let you know."

When I was a tiny scuttling thing in the gutter, I had a name I made for myself. When the imp dealer scooped me up and whipped basic literacy into me, they gave me another name. And when Unathi took me on, I was Quarta.

Then Quinta, when it took on another student. Quarta again, when that one was disappointing and disassembled. Quinta when the replacement came in, Sexta when the next one arrived. I was the least and the lowest, no matter my seniority.

I had been Sexta still when I ran away, and I wasn't Sexta anymore. I wasn't anything at all, not in any way I was sure of, though a sorcerer trying to call me up might have discovered otherwise.

If Unathi caught up with me, I didn't know what I'd become. Nothing I wanted to be.

"Are you going far?" I asked Taylor. "Do you want an escort for most of the way? Maybe we've been in this city too long anyway."

"It's--I'll probably--" He swallowed, and stared down the empty sidewalk in front of us. "I'd appreciate the company. Will you be okay? I said I'd be there tomorrow afternoon. I'll need to travel at night. I was going to take the bus."

"We can afford two tickets," I said. "And I can stay in the bus at any stops if the night's clear. But first, let's pick up my stuff. I still have it stashed down by the camp spot. Tell me about the place you're going?" I smiled up at him, the way humans on the corporeal liked it. They were better in every way than the damned: naive, optimistic, generous, unpredictable. They were _likable_ in a way nearly nothing in Hell was. The only part of the Grand Cause that I still believed in was our perfect right to come play with humanity, before they were winnowed out to the miserable percentage we got in Hell.

If Hell had any sense, it would have made common cause with Heaven, and gotten twice as many humans to play with. But Hell spent too much time fighting over politics to focus on any proper goal.

Maybe trying to find common goals with that many people was always going to be a lost cause. The only time I'd been able to pursue a goal all the way to the end was when I was doing it myself.

Taylor gave me scattered details about the Tether as we skirted the edge of the golf course. Alone, I would have crossed through the middle; a community golf course wasn't all that exclusive. In his company, it was safer to avoid the notice of people who might call the cops on suspicious characters.

Of course every friend came with restrictions on my behavior. I did the same to them; it was how relationships worked. Pay the price and get the benefits. If a person could do that in a measured, reasonable way, instead of in the overwhelming ravenous way my once-and-no-more Word preferred, that could be a real relationship. One that held up for a while.

"I'm going to fix it," Taylor said. He paced in tight circles, branches whipping across his face every time he passed by me. I crouched on the ground, trying to get my arm all the way beneath the bush without getting my knees on the ground. Dirt in the knees was the first step on the path to looking like the kind of person other humans didn't want to associate with. Take a few too many steps on that road, and I'd find myself Charming people just to get a conversation started. "I'll get all this dissonance worked off, and I'll...find some way to deal with the Discord. There's always a way out."

"You could go back home." My fingers finally snagged on the strap of my bag. I finagled it back out. It was a sad muddy thing, but sad muddy bags didn't catch the eye the way clean ones in cute fabric might. "Or would your Archangel take you apart?"

"No, he'd...make me work it off. Penance. Something terrible. Terrible boring and _endless_ , days and weeks and months and years of nothing until he decided I'd learned my lesson. I would rather die. I'll figure out something else."

I sat back on my heels, and looked up at Taylor. He would have been downright attractive if he was cleaned up and wearing decent clothes. Standing up straight and looking people in the eye. Mercurians usually got good vessels, just like Impudites. 

"I'm sorry we have to split up like this," I said. "It's been a pretty good run."

"I'm the one who should apologize. I mean, I shouldn't have sprung this on you so suddenly. Or maybe I should've told you when I talked to the bartender." He crossed his arms over his chest, shoulders hunched in. That was going to make everything harder.

I stood up, and twisted my wrist. The bracelet hanging there slipped apart, straightening and spreading as it went. By the time Taylor had figured out what was happening, it was a sword of dark water resting in my hand.

His arms didn't even slow it down. The blade sliced through as if his vessel was made of water itself, and my sword made of steel.

The blood got _everywhere_. After I'd stowed the body under the bushes, coating my knees in mud and blood both, I checked my bag and found that I didn't have enough clean clothes to look halfway respectable. Talk about getting police called on a person, if I stepped out in public like that.

I walked to a clean patch of ground between the trees, still out of sight of the happy naive golfers in their cute little carts, and switched to my other vessel. It didn't look _that_ different from Taylor's; the right ethnicity, not too far off in height... I'd need to dye my hair blonder before catching the bus. That, and hope the Trade Tether had only picked up a general description of their incoming Outcast, not photos. 

And hope that no one had heard the disturbance of my vessel change. I slid the bracelet up past my elbow, where it sat uncomfortably but out of sight beneath my sleeves. Men in this culture didn't walk around with shiny blue-gray bracelets, and the last thing I wanted was more attention.

That wasn't quite true. The last thing I wanted was to have Unathi catch up with me. A trip to a divine Tether couldn't compare, as risks went. And if I broke my trail cleanly--

Who was I kidding? I would never be _free_ of the Habbalite. Not permanently. But I could get some more distance. I could taste freedom for that little bit longer.

It was worth losing a friend over. Everything had a price.

_I'm sorry; I'm in danger. Gotta run. Nothing personal. You're safer there._ I sent the message to the Mercurian in Limbo, packaged up with one Essence. Just as much as Secundum had sent me. Probably the whole _pay it forward_ concept wouldn't do me any good, but there was the outside chance of making friends again later. Slowing down hostile pursuit when he popped out of Limbo. Either way. It seemed fair.

We only had enough money for one bus ticket, anyway. And the Tether was only expecting one person. No problem. I could be Taylor. Someone had do it, and I was pretty sure I'd do a better job of it than he ever had.


	4. Taylor & The Power Of Assumptions

The Greyhound let me off three miles from the Tether. I was glad to get away from handsy seatmates--Charming a human makes them friendly, not respectful of personal space--and the uncomfortable seating that was still better than the last time I'd flown economy. As economy flights didn't usually last the entire night, I wasn't sure that I'd come out ahead.

The city I had left behind was firmly situated inside summer; the one I arrived at was convinced autumn had arrived. I slung my bag over one shoulder, and set off down the sidewalk with a wet, cold wind blowing in my face. A person might expect the bus station to be down by the docks, but no. The city was big enough to have two bad parts of town; crossing from one to the other took me past a university that just screamed trying too hard with the pillars and ivy-covered brick and so forth. Not a whole lot of happy little residential areas, though. I followed a long strip of industrial and commercial shading back into industrial, up and down, but mostly down as I got nearer the river.

My shoes weren't made for walking. They were better than heels for the purpose, but they sure weren't walking shoes either. No proper arch support and a degree of shine that wore off as I trudged onward.

The Heavenly Tether loomed as I reached the warehouse district that ran up to the docks. A metaphorical looming: I couldn't feel any itch of Heavenly light, or see the building my former friend had named but not, inconveniently, given me an address to. Still, I had to second-guess my plan. It was a terrible plan. Unathi would have pulled it apart, one piece at a time, and asked me to explain all its flaws.

Unathi had been an effective teacher. I gave it credit for that. If the two of us had been discussing my long-term goals and short-term plans, I would have pointed out that sometimes a demon had to take on some serious risks to avoid much larger and more certain dangers. For example, running up against angels because not doing so would call down disapproval from one's Prince. Or one's former teacher.

It surely disapproved of me. It was surely _disappointed_ in me. I had become enough of an individual to make my own decisions, but not the right sort of individual who would make the right sort of decisions. When I could've taken up sonnet-writing or an intense interest in orchids, instead I decided to run away.

Taking whatever artifacts I could get my hands on had been only reasonable, though. Unathi wouldn't have disapproved of that except for the detail of the equipment being its own. I had learned something about being prepared, and thinking fast in a crisis.

I slogged on between warehouses, my feet aching, while river birds--I'd never bothered to learn the names for birds, beyond identifying ducks and chickens, because humans found it strange if I couldn't tell that much--stared down at me from power lines and the tops of fences. Any one of those could hold a Kyriotate. Come to think of it, several of those could hold a single Kyriotate.

But what would one of Heaven's creepiest body-stealing angels see? Just some man with a bag, dustier than his clothing was made for, walking into an area with plenty of other people doing their own jobs. My outfit wasn't right, but it wasn't as if I had a tux on. I could be grateful that the last job I'd done with my male vessel before I ran hadn't been playing waiter for one of Unathi's dinner parties.

I could be grateful for a lot of things, but to whom? Gratitude required an object, and luck did not, in my experience, have an origin. Humans would say _thank god_ or _thank goodness_ as if angels had personally appeared to find them a parking space or keep the boss from noticing their office supply theft, but it was just..coincidence. Most parts of life ran on nothing more directed than complex systems bouncing off each other chaotically.

Better to be glad of what happened because I had made good choices. I made the right friends, and I grabbed opportunity by the collar when it came to my door.

None of the birds followed me. If I kept seeing Kyriotates in every piece of wildlife, I'd end up as paranoid as the Mercurian had been.

I checked dockside buildings systematically: that was my own work. But it was luck that had me find a museum after only three turns, and right beside it, as promised, a three-story building labeled Farley & Sons.

I squared my shoulders.

Then I unsquared them, and skulked in through the front door like I was expecting to be thrown right back out. Nervousness was easy to--wasn't entirely faking, actually, or no more than confidence would have been, and it was a lot more like that Mercurian's demeanor. If they'd had any contact with him before, it was what they would expect.

The inside of the building didn't feel like a Tether. It smelled and looked like the reception area of an office building that didn't spend a lot of time caring about what impression it gave clients. Or maybe it was trying for some kind of folksy, down-home air. The room certainly wasn't sparkling.

"Good afternoon," said the receptionist, with a perfunctory smile. He was a man of a more complex racial background than I could easily pinpoint, though I decided it averaged out to Hispanic. Somewhere in his forties, a little overweight, cute enough in the nerd sort of way. I wouldn't have minded wearing his shirt, with its minute black-and-white checks and tidy black buttons; it was hard to judge the rest of his outfit from the other side of a desk. He either wasn't into men or wasn't into my vessel, given the way he looked at me. Remembering to adjust for different gender expectations was going to be a problem for a while. It was easier when I had a specific Role to hook into, with someone else setting my goals and cover stories.

If I'd wanted a lifetime of that, I could've saved myself all the trouble of running away.

I sidled up to the desk, with a quick look over my shoulder back toward the doors. There were side doors, too, with the kind of Staff Only signs that suggested people who weren't staff tried to walk through them a lot. "I have an, an appointment," I said. I kept my hands in my pockets, and stared mostly at my feet, watching the receptionist's reaction through my eyelashes.

He wasn't shocked. Either he was expecting me, or nervous people in the wrong sorts of clothing for dock work shuffled into his office twice a week. At a Tether either one might be true. "Sign in, please," he said, and slid a clipboard across the desk to me.

It felt like making a statement to write out _A. Taylor_ on the line, and add the time of day from the clock on the wall behind the desk. The A didn't stand for anything; it just seemed like something I ought to add to the name to make it look more like a mortal one. Or the kind a Mercurian would use, having had a Role and plenty of human-style experience.

He had spent decades on the corporeal before he went Outcast, and I had spent half of one there. Most of the first year was on Unathi's estate, mainlining television and magazines and all the lectures it care to gave me, until I could be trusted out in the general human population. And I was _still_ better than him at getting people to like me, even if I wasn't as good at working out their secrets, except by asking them nicely while they were Charmed.

"Head of Security is expecting you," said the receptionist. If he was a Mercurian, he wasn't pulling enough information out of me to look concerned about it, unless there was some panic button getting hammered where I couldn't see his hands. "Third floor, end of the hall, the door's marked." He pointed back towards a set of stairs. Wooden stairs, with rigid rubber strips at the edge of each, obviously applied long after the building was made for safety reasons.

"Do you have an elevator?"

"No, but we have a chair lift if you need it, in the back."

Wasn't Trade supposed to be good with technology? I pulled up a nervous smile, this not being a point I really wanted to argue over. If a Stone Outcast had to resort to working for Traders, maybe he would pick out the most antiquated Tether available to him. "Stairs are fine. Thanks. I'll just...get going. Then."

Usually two flights of stairs would have been nothing. I had done that twice an hour in the last kitchen I worked, just hitting the basement for more supplies, no thanks to the assholes on the line who were supposed to take care of that and were somehow always on a smoke break or babying another pan of scallops when the call went out. With my feet rubbed two thirds of the way towards blisters from the walk, the stairs were a lot less fun.

At least it would make me look authentically twitchy for the angels. And for the security cameras: they might've been discreet, but this technologically backward office had plenty of those.

New cameras. Old locks on doors, the kind with keyholes a person could stare through, if they were so inclined. Either they were halfway through a security upgrade, or--well, something else that I couldn't figure out, because I left my teacher before graduation, and thus never got the course on facility security and infiltration.

It wouldn't have been much of a course, anyway. Maybe a week of text review and a lecture. Unathi didn't believe in relying too heavily on mundane things like that, when any facility worth infiltrating or guarding had all its weak spots made of people.

For example, that receptionist downstairs, who didn't ask for ID. If the Mercurian had owned any to give, which maybe he hadn't anyway. They couldn't be checking their incoming visitors properly, or they wouldn't have let me in.

I made it to the door marked Security without collapsing on the floor. The nameplate said _T.L. Yancy_. Before I could give in to any second thoughts, I knocked on the door like a good responsible angel who had come to work off dissonance.

The door opened.

"Hello," I said. "Mr. Yancy? I'm Taylor. I'm here to work off dissonance?"

Mr. Yancy smiled at me, the obligatory way. I barely noticed. We were the same height, but where my vessel was meant to read _sympathetic_ and _endearing_ and _attractive without being threatening_ in good classic style, he was sharp as razors. Eyes gray like ice under stormclouds even behind sharp-cornered glasses, and all dressed in black and white: black suit, white shirt, black and white sneakers. He looked like the sort of man who was ready to buy the world. Or find it wanting, and cut its throat.

Malakite.

He offered me a hand. "Call me Leo," he says. "Most people do."

My options were flight or a handshake. The latter might mark me out as someone to kill: the former _would_. I took his hand for the fastest shake I could manage, and hoped that he'd take my flinch for general paranoia, and not specific guilt.

What could a Malakite read on me? I didn't know what they considered honorable or not. They couldn't pick up _demon_ out of nothing, or all of Hell's corporeal agents would've been hunted down within a few months of touching ground. I'd killed a friend, left a teacher, abandoned the cause of Hell, rented myself out, poisoned a dinner guest--there was no knowing what he'd pull off me. Or what he'd consider honorable, to dig out of my head.

Demons might get inside my head and change the contents, but they couldn't read the secrets of my past. I didn't have many secrets that anyone else would care about, but they were _mine_ , and I would've taken lies and love and temporary friendship over that loss of privacy any day.

He let go of my hand without drawing any weapons, and let me into the room. "Have a seat, if you want. Coffee?"

"No thanks." I sat down in the first chair I found. "I don't--" Except that he _had_ gone through cups and cups of coffee, spending all his spare money on it when he could've saved up for a motel room and a decent shower. "--really need another cup right now, I'm sort of, uh, jittery, sorry."

"Understandable." There was a sympathetic twist to his smile, and I didn't know how to take that. "Have you worked off dissonance in a Tether before?"

"A few times. Never for Trade." Anyone could pick up dissonance, and I certainly had before. The most innocuous human could turn stubborn at the wrong moment, and make my resonance twist in my hands until it burned right back through me. Of course Unathi had always known Tethers in need of some extra help, and once it had told me outright that I'd been set up to fail--not as a certainty, just a strong possibility--to make sure I knew how to avoid messing with those who had strong wills. And how to work through the horrible taste of dissonance scorching my throat.

"It's tedious manual labor," the Malakite said, opening desk drawers in turn. He took a tablet out of one. It was first gen, and scratched all along one side. I'd always thought Trade was rolling in money, like Greed. Wasn't that what they were for, in Heaven? The people who bankrolled all the violence and research and charities. Maybe I'd found an unfavorite Tether that didn't pull in the big money like the rest of the Word. It _would_ be the sort of place willing to take in an Outcast, just to have an extra hand for a week or two. "We'll find you some loaner clothes so that you don't ruin those, unless you've packed along your own."

"What will I be doing?" I'd hoped for filing, given the Word. Or sweeping floors. Even _scrubbing_ floors. Something other than a week straight of gutting, scaling, deboning, and portioning out fish, with every tiny nick in the skin stinging and going numb from the endless ice and blood wash over my hands. The Tether didn't have a restaurant that I'd seen, but...they were on the docks. There might not be any escape from seafood on either side of the war.

"Riverbed cleanup. We have an artifact that'll let you breathe down there, and the Seneschal will give you pointers. Oliva will stop by too, for messages and the like. Two six-hour shifts a day, which strikes me as excessive, given local labor laws, but since we don't need to sleep..." He shrugged, frowning at the tablet. "Handbook says I now ask a series of invasive personal questions for our records."

"Must we?" That had come out whinier than I intended, but I decided not to cover for it. I was playing a whiny sort of Mercurian. If he'd ever taken responsibility for his own decisions, he wouldn't have ended up walking around covered in Discord and complaining to a demon about how his Archangel and Wordmates had done him wrong.

"I'm not up to bucking protocol today. Tell you what; you can take the Fifth on any of these you really don't want to answer, so long as you don't mind my recording that you did so."

"It's a deal," I said. That got a flash of a smile from him, and I nearly panicked. I hadn't meant to agree like _that_ , not in a binding way--but it didn't feel like a Geas, and everything I'd heard about Traders said they couldn't enforce promises on anyone but themselves, unless you agreed to be bound. Like much more considerate Lilim. Likely he just enjoyed watching someone play along with the Word he served.

"Let's see. Already filled in the details you signed in with, we can skip this whole section because you're Outcast, and oh, this isn't very polite." He looked up from the form he was tapping his way through. "How did you become Outcast?"

If I refused to answer that one, he might throw me right out of the Tether. Or just get suspicious enough to go talk to Stone, and they might have _pictures_ , and it was a whole sequence of unknowns I didn't want to follow. "I shot someone," I said. "A human."

The Malakite blinked at me. "Aren't you a Mercurian of Stone?"

"It was an accident!" Or so he had always claimed, when he talked about it at all.

"That's...yeah, that'll get you into some trouble." He tapped something out on the screen. "Do you intend to continue this pattern of...ranged violence against humans?"

"No." There were a few people I wouldn't have minded putting bullets in, but none of them were human.

"Are you working towards a resolution of the matter that divided you from your Archangel?"

No, if I was answering for the identity I'd taken on. No, for me and my own Prince. "Yes," I said. It was the sort of answer authority figures always wanted.

Mr. Call-Me-Leo flicked a glance at me, like maybe I shouldn't have answered that so quickly. "Do you want counseling or mediation services to help you resolve the aforementioned division?"

"It really says that?"

"I'm paraphrasing. Should I take that as a no?"

"I'm--not really looking to hire a therapist right now." Ever. _Ever._ I had gone through enough psych evaluations in demonling sorting and grades, even before Unathi took me on.

"Apparently we offer pretty good rates, but skipping ahead." His fingernail clicked against the tablet's screen. "Do you--" He stopped, and I realized the clicking wasn't coming from him, but the window behind. "Just a minute."

It might not have been the wisest move for a security expert to turn his back on a strange man inside the building. Except I sat politely in the chair I'd picked, like a repentant Mercurian who just wanted to get the invasive personal questions over with, so maybe he was enough of a judge of character to know it was safe. Or maybe I was that far in past their defenses.

He shoved the office window open. The pigeon the windowsill stopped rapping on the glass, and turned its head to the side to fix an eye on me. It cooed, as pigeons were wont to do, but it didn't sound very happy.

"I forgot," said the Malakite. To the pigeon. _Kyriotate_ , unless it was his familiar, some reliever stuck with no voice but a pair of wings to make up for it. "Now isn't a good time."

The pigeon cooed even more pointedly. No one but a War-blind human could have mistaken that for the natural response of an ordinary bird.

"And I'll be sure to listen to your excellent points afterward, but I'm doing some of that invasive paperwork Heaven loves so much, and I think there are enough privacy violations going on in this office already without adding a third party."

The pigeon was not impressed by this line of argument.

"If there's any trouble," said the Malakite, "you can come in then. Take a seat on the windowsill if it'll make you happy. But I _am_ drawing a boundary here, Nik. This is work, and it's not about my privacy."

The pigeon fluffed up, most of the way to becoming an angry featherduster. But it did back up a few inches: enough for him to close the window again, and turn back to me.

"Sorry about that. So, do you intend the Tether, its environs, its possessions, or its inhabitants, employees, et cetera, any harm?"

"No?" I probably should've said that with more determination. "What sort of order are these questions in, anyway?"

"The program runs them through in a semi-random order, to avoid bias through sequencing." He tapped the screen. "Are you--okay, that's no one's business but your own."

I didn't ask. I didn't want to know.

He frowned at the tablet. "...okay, this one's fair. To the best of your knowledge, are you currently being pursued by the law enforcement branch of any agency, mortal or otherwise, not counting Judgment's usual side-eye for Outcasts?"

That was probably a paraphrase again. "Definitely not."

"Oh, good. Those ones get awkward. I don't even bother asking that question when the Wind Servitors show up. I just tick 'yes' and move on. Most of the rest of this is about special needs. Pre-existing contracts, Discord, mortal servants, that kind of thing. Unless you have a friend waiting aside, I assume you don't need room and board for anyone but yourself." 

"Just me." Me and my Discord. I stared at the floor instead of the Malakite, who might be able to pick up more from eye contact the way Lilim could--and why hadn't Unathi covered angelic resonance in more detail? I knew the basics, but I didn't know their limits, not like with demons. They were all _keep away from them once they're identified_ and _never make direct factual statements with any bearing on your real work_ and _you're not old enough to handle an angel, so we'll get to that later._ For all I knew, it had been one of Uanthi's tests, and I had failed by not pressing harder for more information. But I hadn't exactly been planning to hang around with the divine presence on Earth at the time.

And they were sending me outside. To work _outside_. None of my other dissonance gigs had done that. Usually I was lucky to see sunlight during the full week.

"In that case--"

"I can't do nights," I blurted out. At least I was doing a good job of keeping up the pretense of being that awkward, twitchy Mercurian, at this rate. "I mean. Moonlight. I can't do moonlight."

"Discord?" He didn't even sound disapproving, just...professional. I appreciated that more than I should've. I nodded. "Okay, we'll check a, uh, whatever kind of chart shows when the moon rises and sets, and arrange your shifts so that you don't walk through moonlight uncovered. How bad is it? Do you expect to have a problem with it if you're a few meters underwater?"

"I...don't know. I haven't been doing a lot of swimming since I got it. If the sun's still up, it doesn't hurt, but once the sun goes down it...gets complicated." Painful. My palms itched just thinking about it, and the back of my neck where I'd first discovered that little side-effect of breaking my Heart.

"So we'll be careful. If it comes to it, we can find you something to do only during hours when the moon's not out." He set the tablet down on the desk; that move across the room made it perfectly clear that the pigeon was still at the window, glaring at both of us. "Any questions?"

I kept my head tilted towards the floor, to make lip-reading that much harder. "Who is that?"

"Nik? She's--" He stopped, as if the answer wasn't easy enough to come immediately to mind. No, that wasn't it. He stopped because he'd come up with the easy answer, and decided not to give it to me. I could tell the difference after that much time with humans, who would think something honest and then say something polite instead, more often than you might expect. "I do security for the Tether, she does security for me, along with her own work. Kyriotate of the Sword. She's on loan." He shot a look back at the pigeon as well. "She's not upset with you, whatever that looks like. Just me."

The pigeon fluffed itself up, and kept up the glare. I was not convinced.

"Mr. Yancy--" I swapped when I saw his expression. He had actually _meant_ what he said about the names. "Leo, this is rude to ask, but what Choir are you? The Seraph didn't tell me who to expect." Surely the Mercurian would have told me if he knew. Surely. He'd told me everything else, while he was trying to convince himself this was still a good idea.

"Ofanite," he said. "Why do you ask?"

I could be sure he wasn't a Seraph, because he couldn't be lying, but I still wasn't sure I believed that. Except I couldn't think of why he'd lie to me. Or why he'd have someone else fussing at him about security, and talking with strangers alone, if he was a Malakite.

"Just wondering," I said, and I was pretty sure he didn't believe that one. "Um. You said something about a room? Can I leave my bag there?"

I could. It had a _shower_. And the Light of Heaven hadn't shown up yet, so as last-minute escape plans went, I was pretty happy with how that one was going.


	5. In Which My Inventory Is Critiqued

I let Nik back inside once Taylor's sent off to the least office-like room in the building. I have moderate hopes that he'll take better care of it than the last inhabitants, a four-pack of Windies who were laying low for three days. The cleaning staff is getting some impressive bonuses this Christmas to make up for what happened in there. Maybe Thanksgiving bonuses. We already apologized in person, since the assholes responsible were gone before we found out what happened.

Anyway, it should be clean enough to make him happy. Unlike the Kyriotate who has just come in through my window.

"Look," I say, "it wasn't deliberate. I just forgot."

Nik lands on the back of my chair, and stares pointedly at my side. So I open my coat and show her that, yes, she's entirely right.

"It's not like I did it deliberately," I say. "And what difference does it make? I'm a terrible shot."

She snorts. You wouldn't think a pigeon could do that, but there are all sorts of surprising things that small birds can get up to once you put a Kyriotate inside them.

"That was with sniper rifles, which are _different_ from handguns. I hate those things. They break if you look at them funny, they run out of bullets, they're imprecise, get too close to another person and they can just take the thing away from you and use it against you..."

The pigeon sighs, and flutters over to my shoulder. More inquisitive, now.

"No, it's--not like I miss the whole _thing_ , exactly, but there's something to be said for being the weapon instead of owning one. And I was good with it, which doesn't exactly matter now." I shove the tablet with its stupid list of questions back into a drawer, where I might not have to look at it again for, oh, weeks. Depending on how many idiot Windies show up in the near future. "Bullets are mostly good for hurting people, which is a dumb use of a good tool anyway, so that makes them a lousy tool. I'd be better off carrying a good knife."

Nik coos dubiously, but that's not exactly a _bad idea, Leo_ , so maybe it's something we can talk about when she shows up in someone with the power of speech.

"You're going to drag me down to the shooting range again, aren't you."

Nik bobs her head.

"Will you leave it be if I remember the damn thing tomorrow?"

Pigeons can, in fact, shake their heads, even if it looks a bit awkward.

I drop into my chair, and prop my feet on the desk. The camera feeds are all playing along, dull as usual, and with none of the tells I've set up for when some Windy who thinks they're oh-so-smart tries to loop the feed. Like I don't know that trick. "Is it just me, or do these questions come across as excessively invasive?"

Nik fluffs herself through her bird equivalent of a shrug. It's not the sort of thing she worries about.

"I think he was afraid I was--I don't know. Not a Seraph, though he wasn't being particularly honest. Someone who could pick up the wrong sorts of secrets out of his head. You'd think there would be more _rules_ about using those resonances, Nik. It's not reasonable to pry through a person's emotions and history and relationships just because they happen to be standing in front of you."

Her response is noncommittal. I didn't really expect otherwise. She borrows people's bodies; compared to that, what's a quick check into a tiny subset of their minds?

"Heaven could use a better sense of personal space, and develop some more respect for boundaries. That's all I'm saying."

Maybe it would bother me less if I weren't the one asking the questions. I'm not used to being on this side of the authority lines.

#

I get Taylor squared away with the artifact he needs for underwater work, and packed off to the Seneschal to let her explain the setup to him. He has enough sense to swap to clothes from our box of loaners--we send Olivia over to Goodwill with a stack of twenties every month to refill and expand the options, so it's a mess, but at least it's a catholic sort of mess--before hauling on the backpack we used to disguise the artifact. I don't even understand how it works, and I suspect we'd be in trouble if we had to replace it, but when your Tether locus is situated in the river itself, there aren't a lot of other options for Tether work. Not unless we want to anchor a boat in the middle of traffic with a stack of paperwork in need of sorting.

Once Justin's done redirecting a pair of affable tourists (and their less patient offspring) who walked into the wrong building, I stop at reception. "I need you to call that Seraph."

"Oh, let me check my rolodex." He mimes flipping through cards. "That just narrows it down to seventeen different--"

"The Outcast Creationer who tends bar and doesn't give us her name."

" _That_ Seraph. Why didn't you say so?"

"Because I thought the lack of name would, itself, be sufficient indication of which one I meant? Anyway, I need you to call her up and ask about this Mercurian."

"And you can't call--"

"Because Judgment likes it better when Outcasts don't speak to angels in good standing."

"And that's _you_."

"To everyone's surprise," I say, "yes. Ask her for whatever she's willing to tell us about Taylor."

Justin rolls his eyes, but writes this down instead of complaining about my lack of precision. He knows damn well that if he pushes hard enough I'll give him an exhaustive list of questions, and instructions to ask them all. We've done that particular dance once before. "Is there something wrong?"

"Nothing major," I say, "that I'm aware of. He doesn't like answering questions, and he's not answering all of them honestly."

"He's an Outcast. That's made of not doing things properly, isn't it?"

"One way or another." What kind of Mercurian shot someone? Okay, Sean aside, so never mind that question. What kind of _Servitor of Stone_ would even pick up a gun? That sounded like a recipe for a Fall, not skulking around looking to work off dissonance before anything got worse.

But what do I know about Falls, anyway? Given what I've heard about Stone, it's entirely in line with their philosophy for an angel to be kicked Outcast after a single mistake, and left to wander the Earth in misery until they've learned to beg for forgiveness. Or done something dramatic to earn it.

Justin snaps his fingers in front of me. "Seriously, that's what you want. 'Hello, mysterious unnamed Seraph, I want you to give me more details on this Outcast you sent to us, despite your taciturn habits. No, no reason why. Just anything and everything.'"

"You're good with people," I say. "You'll figure it out."

"You said that about the squirrels, too."

"And you figured it out, didn't you?"

Justin has an excellent collection of profanity that he only brings out when there aren't any tourists in the building. Or the Seneschal, who has rather old-fashioned views about appropriate language. I file away the best phrases for later reference, and give him a cheery wave on my way back to the office.


	6. Interlude: Coffee, Two Packets Raw Sugar, Half-And-Half

Secundum held the umbrella, for what little good that did. The atmosphere was working itself up towards a storm; so far, it had managed nothing better than a steady drizzle and enough cloud cover to make the late afternoon indistinguishable from evening. Unathi crouched between dripping bushes with its fingers on the corpse's throat. "Show me his hands."

Quinta swept the beam of their flashlight across the body's hands and arms. "Stab wounds," she said. Her voice rasped from the throat of her host, who had made poor decisions about tobacco use over the course of several decades. "Defense wounds?"

"It doesn't seem like her style," Secundum said.

"Discord makes people crazy," Quinta said, and coughed. "Or she was already crazy. She did run away."

"Impudites don't kill people," Secundum said, as dogged as its celestial form. "Except for Death. She wouldn't have joined up with Death. She didn't even like butchering things."

"Impudites don't kill humans," Unathi said, before its students could pursue an argument too far while working from faulty premises. "Except for those with the right attunements."

"I mean," Secundum said, tilting the umbrella to where Unathi's head had moved--as students went, the Djinn was more conscientious than many--"if she _was_ going to kill someone, I would think she'd doing it in the back, not while they were looking at her and could put their hands up. And maybe that one's not human."

"Or maybe she went crazy," Quinta said, "because _Discord_. You have to be crazy to break your Heart even before that gets added in."

Unathi took the umbrella from Secundum and closed it. There was no saving any water-soluble marks on the corpse's skin at this point anyway. "Quinta. Bring the van around to the side, and clear any observers."

She coughed, deep and hard, and kept going for a long moment before she answered. "Right away, Unathi. Should I set up the table?"

"Do."

Unathi tucked the umbrella under an arm, and took the corpse's shoulders. Secundum took the feet without any need for prompting.

"It doesn't seem like her, though," Secundum said, as they negotiated their way together through a patch of slick mud. "Even if she was here, why kill anyone? She's good at talking people around."

"Are you worried that she's encroaching on your areas of specialty, Secundum?"

The Djinn worried at its lower lip for a moment. It was thoroughly worried, though likely not about that. Secundum had been the type to chew over a problem to the point of morose obsession since it was a floppy-eared child Unathi dredged out of a Shal-Mari gutter. "No," it said at last. "Killing one person doesn't make her a killer, if this is her work at all."

The van hadn't arrived yet; Unathi stopped behind a tree where it could watch the road without being too easily seen by vehicles passing by. It preferred to resolve this investigation with as a little disturbance as possible; mortal authorities were simple enough to fend off, but celestial ones from either side could cause difficulties.

No doubt its Prince would prefer a quiet, rapid resolution to this loose end. Unathi preferred a conclusive, satisfying, _useful_ resolution; that was no reason to get noisy along the way.

"Unathi?"

"Yes?"

"When we find her, are you going to kill her?"

"I hadn't decided yet," Unathi said. Honesty produced the best results from the sorts of students who were likely to be worth the time invested in them. "Do you have a preference?"

Secundum shrugged, which was as good as an answer from a Djinn. And Quinta arrived with the van.

#

Thunder called from a great distance just as the van doors closed. "Find a place to park," Unathi said, while Secundum arranged the corpse on the table. The situation was not urgent enough to make it conduct autopsies in a moving vehicle quite yet. "Secundum--"

"On it," said the Djinn, leaning in to steady the body against acceleration.

Within a kilometer, the rain had begun to batter at the windshield. Unathi left the corpse to Secundum's watch, and focused on the traffic. There were patterns in the ways humanity interacted. Their choices in consumption, their choices in how they responded to each other, every tiny decision they made from the size of their cars to when they bothered to pack umbrellas. Billions of individuals, all making their own choices, with so many congruences one might almost take the phenomena as unanimity.

A comforting illusion, for the sorts of people who desired comfort.

In the parking lot of a strip mall, Quinta turned off the engine and climbed into the back. "What are we looking for?"

"Two details in particular," Unathi said, "which may tell us a third." It took the corpse's arms, and crossed them over the chest. "What do you think killed him?"

"Knife," Quinta said promptly. "Or something like it. Look at those slashes."

"Not slashes," Secundum said. It put a finger to the edge of one wound. "Stab. It went right through." The Djinn lifted that arm, and considered the wound in the chest. "All the way through. One stab?"

Unathi offered it a scalpel.

Secundum slid that through the hole in the arm. "Right through bone. And the cloth is sliced clean, here. None of it inside. Not that I can find yet; I'd have to dissect to be sure."

"What does that?" Quinta asked. "She's nowhere near that strong."

"An artifact." Unathi took the scalpel back. "Cut away the clothing. I want a look at his stomach."

The subsequent hour of dissection made the Habbalite wish for one of its properly equipped labs. The van had enough tools for simple autopsies, interrogations, cooking, and other such basics, and not enough to do any of those thoroughly.

After its hands were clean, it sat down in one of the fold-out chairs, and waited for its students to finish the tidying. Quinta forgot to update the supplies list; Secundum took over for her without comment. Fastidious Djinn were always the correct choice, when filling that slot among the first line of students. Unfortunate, perhaps, that Shedim did not come in fastidious flavors so often, but she did make up for it with a gift for delicate use of hosts. Each student had their own talents, and a good thing too; why else would there be reason to have multiple Bands? Plus the solitary Choir of Hell.

"The second detail," Unathi said. "What did he last eat before he died?"

"Coffee." Secundum spread its hands across its knees, with precise bilateral symmetry. Every finger from one side in the same place as the other. "As you found."

"And nothing else," Quinta said. She folded her arms across her chest, her current host a wiry creature with pale eyes. "Not _anything_ else, anywhere in his system. What sort of homeless man spends money on coffee instead of food?"

"Caffeine addict," Secundum offered.

"Someone who doesn't need to eat," Quinta said. "Celestial. Or ethereal, maybe. Or undead. Or a starving caffeine addict, but probably someone she _could_ kill."

"So it was her," Secundum said. "With an artifact. What artifact?"

"A particularly dangerous sword," Unathi said. It checked on their reactions; they both took its assessment in the spirit intended. "Now, why would she kill a celestial?"

"Self-defense," Quinta said, but frowned as she said it. "No. She's smarter than that. She wouldn't walk into a secret place with someone dangerous. Even a human who might be dangerous. Unless he jumped her?"

"Not the right wound profile." Secundum nodded towards the sealed waste containers. "He wasn't expecting it."

"So she's just crazy," Quinta said. "A sane Impudite doesn't just--stab someone for no good reason."

"Let us assume," Unathi said, "that she had a reason. We might also assume, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, that a Servitor in good standing would be unlikely to choose the implied Role of that corpse."

Secundum said nothing, staring at its own knuckles. It would require a discussion in the near future. Privately, with a certain degree of sensitivity for the problem of crossed loyalties.

Quinta raised a hand. "I think we need to check on who this body was when he was alive, to find out why she'd kill him, if she wasn't Discord-crazy."

"Quite." Unathi watched its students. "How would we start on that?"

"Find where the Renegades and Outcasts are," Secundum said, without looking up. "Ask them."

"Tricky," Quinta said.

"No." Unathi allowed the two of them a smile. "Not with my contacts."


	7. In Which I Have Dinner With Friends

I leave the office at half past five, feeling (as is apparently traditional by this point, and as much a part of the end-of-day custom as logging off at the computer) as if I'm getting away with something by only putting in eight hours. This feeling isn't improved any by Justin still being at the reception desk.

"You have a life," I tell him, pausing at the desk with a bag of office supplies--the kind it's awkward to keep at home, in case anyone shows up with a warrant--slung over my shoulder. "You've mentioned it before. Why are you still here?"

"I'm not showing up until eleven tomorrow, so I'm making up the hours now."

"Doctor's appointment?"

"Sleeping in late after a raid." He waits a moment to see if I mean to say anything rude, then continues, "Your Seraph, comma, unnamed, isn't answering the phone. How late should I keep trying?"

"It's a bar. Try every hour or so while you're here. If she's screening calls, I'll resort to some other method of asking intrusive questions about other people's private lives."

Justin gives that little shrug that I've seen from any number of mortals working for Heaven, which translates roughly as _Angels, who can understand them?_ It bothers me every damn time. Not much. But still. After a few millennia of human/angel interaction, you'd think we'd have the kinks worked out.

Or maybe it's just a convenient excuse, and that shrug would be _Bosses, who can understand them?_ if I were mortal as well. It's not worth overthinking. I flip him a wave, and do a quick perimeter sweep on the way out. There's not a lot of rushing around to do when I know I'll be trapped in the poorly named rush hour all the way back home.

I ask the Symphony on the way out the door if there's a better route I could take. Months of this, and it's never given me a better answer than my usual path. Limited bridges make for some distinct traffic choke-points, and short of convincing someone this Tether needs a helicopter and matching pad (a man can dream, can't I?), I'm stuck with the same route as ever.

Or I could move. But that would be giving up. There's something to be said for sticking it out with a decision, if it's not a terrible one. We're not all Elohim, and we can't all be optimal at every point. (Neither can they; they just act as if it's so.) And thus my commute is terrible, I work a reasonable number of hours like a human in my position might, and we don't talk to the local authorities about what I get up to late at night with the office supplies.

All that traffic, and I'm still the first one home.

The cat glares at me from the top of a bookcase while I check her food, water, litter box, assortment of toys guaranteed to give her the proper amount of mental stimulation. "What you want," I tell her, "is beyond me. You have everything you could need."

She stares balefully.

"It doesn't work," I say. "I've known Djinn, and they can hold a grudge for much longer."

The cat's unimpressed. I get back to setting up for dinner: clean dishes put away, the table set, the ottoman I only thought to acquire after Nik had a quiet word with me shoved into place by the couch. Everything's in place. Tidy.

It's still strange. Every morning and every night when I walk into this place and it's as I left it, when what I've acquired waits for me, it's just _strange_. You'd expect that by now there'd have been--I don't know, a burglary or fire or brawl. Something to break windows and destroy what I've put together.

Not yet. Not quite yet.

Nik can stalk up on the place when she means to, but with Xiomara along, I hear both of them in the hall well before they reach the door. Which means I can hold that open and let them inside with minimal fuss, while the cat hides under the couch. "What are we having tonight?"

"Chicken biryani." Nik hands me the grocery bags. "Plus assorted sides, so I hope you're up for chopping." She turns to help Xiomara, but the Soldier's already halfway across the room. "You okay?"

Xiomara sits heavily on the couch, and sets her crutch to the side. "Fine. Don't mind me."

"If you need anything--"

"I'm perfectly capable of asking for it, Nik." Xiomara is able to say this without sounding annoyed, which I suspect comes from years of experience. "Don't mind me. I'm going to luxuriate in not doing any of the cooking myself."

I take her at her word. In a moment, Nik does too, and we get into the cooking process. I'm still no damn good at working from recipes that aren't printed on the backs of boxes, but I can chop vegetables and pull out dishes perfectly well. Even if it does make me think of a rainy December in Seattle, and people I'm unlikely to see again.

Nik and Xiomara chat about the weather, in the usual small talk style. Unusually late summer weather; it can't last. The big storm front coming in across the east coast isn't likely to hit us. There were geese down at the park, looking a little misdirected... I keep a fraction of attention on it and pay attention to my chopping. There's this rhythm to breaking food down into pieces that works for me. I don't like to fidget; it's too...stereotypical. As Ofanite things go. But the back and forth of the knife is soothing, and it does something worthwhile.

I'm all for motion. But it ought to have a purpose. Motion for its own sake is like a Seraph standing in the middle of the room yelling out facts about physics. Sure, it's truth, but why _bother_?

"You should give this cat a name," Xiomara says, the aforementioned cat kneading vigorously at her legs. "She's more than a Kyriotate host, isn't she?"

"She wouldn't answer to it anyway." I bring Xio a beer; the cat stares at me through slitted eyes while I'm in arm's reach. "Besides, Animals would probably get annoyed, if they aren't already."

"You should name things you like." Xiomara scratches the cat under the chin, and gets the purring I never do, except for when Nik's inhabiting the beast. "Or is this some angel thing?"

"Can't be." I get myself a beer--none for Nik, who's alcohol-free these days for reasons I don't particularly follow and haven't gone prying about--and slide vegetables into the rice cooker, which acts as a steamer when my friends are here to do the cooking. "I'm no good at angel things."

"You're fine," Nik says. "You're in good standing."

"You're fine by _me_ ," Xiomara says, "for whatever that's worth. Mind, it's a low bar to cross. You've met met Edmondiel."

I have a deeper swig of beer. "Well. Malakim."

"And most Seraphim--"

"I've met some _perfectly_ reasonable Seraphim."

"Yes," Xio says, "and one of these days you'll introduce me to one. No offense meant, Leo, but every one of you angels only gets away with pretending to be human because us humans are good at overlooking the little problems in the interest of sociability."

"Can't deny it," I say. "And just think, we're only the ones they let down on Earth. Just wait until you bump into the really strange ones in Heaven."

"After I die." Xio stares out the windows, across the balcony to the river. "Can't say I'm in any hurry for that, no matter how pleasant Heaven is. I've spent enough time skipping out on people's ideas of the perfect future that ought to be enough to compensate for the imperfect now already."

"It's not perfect. It just avoids certain types of failure states."

"Sliced, Leo," Nik says, "not minced," and takes the last set of vegetables away from me.

"Can't lie to me," Xio says wryly. "Heaven's perfect. Everyone who doesn't know a thing about the war has told me so."

"Do they talk much about Heaven in church?" As Nik's done with me, I take a seat across from Xiomara. Even if it does get me another feline glare. "I thought it was all politics."

"Depends on the priest. I wouldn't even go, except for my brothers." Xio's shrug is directed mostly at Nik, and a little apologetic, though I don't think she has much to apologize for. Even to another person serving the Sword. Why deal with religious institutions if you know the actual truth about how to work to God's will?

Given how often Archangels disagree on methods, maybe being a Soldier doesn't help all that much.

"I find confession good for the soul," Nik says at last. All her focus is on the cooking, at least as her body language shows, but a Kyriotate never has all its attention on a single thing. Or at least not from a single angle.

"When a Malakite keeps telling me exactly what I've done wrong lately," Xio says, "confession seems redundant."

"Edmondiel's an ass," Nik says. "You shouldn't take her opinion on anything narrower than the ultimate righteousness of the Word we serve as particularly valid."

I glance out the window; the sun's already down, and the lights across the shore are full bright. "Is she around tonight?"

"Not in the city, so far as I know," Xio says. "Why?"

"I'm doing some breaking and entering in a place that might or might not have demons involved. Probably not, though."

"I expect she'll be back in a few days," Xio says, "if you want to wait for backup."

"Fuck, no. The last thing I want with _maybe demons_ is a Malakite of the Sword breathing down my neck, ready to stab anyone who looks at us funny. I haven't killed anyone since I reached the corporeal. It's nice. I'd like to keep the non-lethal streak going for a few more months before the obligatory murder catches up with me."

Xio is giving me one of those looks that reminds me of the differences between celestials and humans, even when it's humans in the know.

"Not that I did a lot of casual murder," I say. "Before. In general."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"Dinner in five," Nik says, so Xio and I take up assorted sinks to wash our hands, and then I help get the food on the table.

I refuse to dwell on other matters. Like that peculiar assortment of demons I met in Seattle, who could do this the same way. In slightly larger numbers. There's nothing about them in particular that made the situation unique, and even if I liked some of them--well, demons. I was good at dealing with demons when I was one, and so it's no good thinking about them now.

"It's the certainty," Xio says, "that ends up getting on my nerves. It's so...paternalistic. Like you people have everything figured out, and we're just doomed to struggle along without knowing as much."

"Doomed is a strong word for it," I say. "In theory, we're supposed to keep the interference to the minimum for your benefit."

"I don't see how stabbing people is minimal."

"Well," I say, "Malakim."

"It's still minimal intervention," Nik says, entirely serious over her plate of dinner. The cat has settled in my lap, which means that's her again. "Direct intervention would be--I don't know, running the government wholesale. Battles in the middle of the street."

"Maybe it would be for the best," Xio says. "Get the whole damn thing over with. Or is it that you're not sure your side would win, if it came down to that?"

"Hell's not sure," I say, "or they'd have jumped on the opportunity by now. As for Heaven... I don't know. Yves still has a lot of sway, and even if Laurence commands the _forces_ , that doesn't mean he sets policy as a whole. It's hard to say what's going to give the best results, when it comes to massive intervention. Maybe it would invalidate every destiny out there for a human, if they were around when the final war hit."

"But what about the generation after that?" Xio asks. "Do they get destinies to pursue without any demonic interference?"

"I don't know. Maybe. If we win. Maybe if the final battle hits, everything stops, and there's not another generation. I don't know how it works." Odd to admit that out loud, because it's not something I've given much thought to before. The final battle has always been the monster under the bed, if the bed were waiting at the end of the world. Something to give you a shiver. Not something to think about seriously. Not in any of the Words I served, anyway. Fire may way to burn the world down, but in a way that leaves people to be impressed by the flames. Usually. "Destiny's a tricky thing, and I'm glad I don't serve the Word, so I don't have to think about it much."

"Destiny aims us towards Heaven," Nik says. "Eventually." Sometimes she doesn't remember to stop pushing her food around the plate and actually eat it, but tonight, when she's done all the cooking, she remembers. Which ends up reminding me of our time together before, when she was riding human hosts and needed to take care of them properly. _Stop at the next exit and get this human some food, Leo. They need a decent meal._ I don't miss the situation, but sometimes I miss the setup. Her and me and Ferro, doing odd jobs for Heaven and Lilim and ourselves, keeping one step ahead of the authorities.

Now I _am_ an authority figure, and not very comfortable with that.

"If all Heaven cared about was getting people there directly," Xio says, "they'd sent Malakim out to cut the throats of people who'd just achieved their destinies, and not risk any confusion on the matter. So it has to be more than that."

"Or they're just aware of the ripple effect," I say. "A whole lot of unsolved murders often don't put people in the right mind to pursue their destinies, among those still living." I push a fork around on my plate, and remember to have a bite. "Though it might inspire some. Now there's another question I'm glad I don't have to deal with as part of my job. When it's appropriate to do something wrong to push another person towards their destiny."

"Says the man who's going breaking and entering tonight."

"We have a whole _Word_ for that, Xio. Can't be that wrong." At her expression, I amend that to, "It's at least the lesser of various evils. Sometimes. Besides, trying to work out who would have done what if something else happened will lead you down rabbit holes. Even for Destiny Servitors and Elohim."

"They can practically see the future," Xio says. "They should be able to work these things out."

"Maybe. Here, try this. When should I have redeemed?"

Xiomara snorts. "This is a trick question, isn't it?"

"It is," Nik says. "Do you want any more?"

"Not if there's dessert. Otherwise, hit me." They deal with the arrangement of food, and then Xio leans in over the table, chin on her clasped hands. "Fine. I'll bite. I say you should have redeemed the instant you reached the corporeal, and could have run to a Tether."

"Okay. Let's say I do that." I lean in, because it's either that or get up and pace. (I'm in the right place, at the right time. Good enough.) "Assuming I somehow succeed, that leaves us with a handful of college students who live--most likely--through a particular day when they might not have otherwise."

"A plus," Xiomara says. "What's the catch?"

I shrug. "Am I credited for the good that they do, that they might not have done otherwise?"

She points a fork at me. "So there it is. Do we hold you responsible for their evil, as well?"

"Yeah, that's part of it. Go ask someone from Destiny if any of them had already hit their destiny, and went to Heaven. Which could've been complicated by another six decades of life. Or the reverse, and I kept them from confusing the issue when they'd already reached their fate. Or maybe neither. Maybe none of them would've gotten to Heaven or Hell. Maybe one of them would've sparked something far more destructive and terrible. Or something amazing that would've inspired others. Maybe none of them would've done a damn thing of note all their lives. How am I supposed to know?"

"Still," Xio says.

"Still." I get up to grab another beer from the fridge. I'm still well on the safe side of sober, and will be for a while yet, but I'll stop at this one, because I do have fiddly work to do later tonight. "If I'm not around, what happens when my ex decides to push a Cherub of Fire into a Fall?"

"I don't know," Xio says, as Nik listens, silent. She is an enigmatic figure as the cat, perched on the kitchen counter and watching us. "What happens?"

"I don't know. Maybe the Cherub still Falls. Maybe she doesn't. Maybe she ends up in Limbo, and repents. Maybe she ends up in Limbo, and comes out covered in Discord, more dangerous than before. Maybe she saves Katherine and runs back to Heaven. Maybe no one saves that kid at all."

"What happened to her?" 

"Judgment," I say. "--not like _that_ , I mean, I stowed her with Judgment, because Flowers couldn't seem to keep her safe. Maybe it was a bad call."

"Maybe you should have left her with Flowers," Nik says softly.

"Sure. And stayed there. That's another turning point." These aren't the sorts of things to talk about with Soldiers, usually, but Xio's a friend, and if I can't talk about this with friends, who's left to talk with at all? Penny will listen and Penny will understand, but I don't want to drop everything on him. He deserves better. "I bring Katherine to Flowers after going Renegade, and stay there. It's not a bad decision."

This is where Nik should say _And then you never meet me,_ but she's not going to. She cleans her plate, and stands up to clear the table. She's conscientious. She always has been, in one way or another, and that's why the Sword and Trade both agreed to let her be my bodyguard, despite the awkwardness of her unresolved charges.

"But if I swap to Heaven there," I say, "I never meet Ferro, and it didn't deserve to be pulled around by Nightmares, no matter what the rules are about ethereals on the corporeal."

"I don't really understand those," Xio says.

"Ethereals? Or the rules?"

"Either. Both." Xio waves a hand. "Let's move to the living room, if we're done with dinner. This chair isn't comfortable."

"I can get another," I say, and I do pause to help Nik, who is not my _servant_ , not in any form. She's my friend and my bodyguard, and she's...well. That should be enough, shouldn't it? Friend and bodyguard. _Friend_ should be enough for anything.

"Like hell," Xio says, with great deliberateness, as she makes her way to the table, "do I need one more accommodation. Your chairs are fine."

_Fine_ covers a lot of things that aren't, when it's Xiomara talking, and I know enough about humans--about people--to not press the matter. Not since I realized just how much she was waiting for me to be an asshole on account of being an Ofanite, and thus incapable of understanding some difficulty in movement.

I've had enough Discord in my time to understand _restraints_ , thank you very much. Soulbound or otherwise.

"So," she says, once we're all seated, her in the most comfortable chair and Nik beside me on the couch--I am bracketed by vessel and cat--"what's the next turning point? You save Ferro, and then...what? The point where you could stop being a demon, but you're making a point, so you think it's a bad idea."

"When I left the Marches." Sometimes I miss that place. There are a lot of things I miss, sometimes, but not enough to want them back, compared to what I'd lose in getting there. "I saved Katherine. No fault to me there. It's a solid good. And I ran away again. I go to Heaven then, well, Valefor gets one fewer Calabite in his ranks."

"But," says Xio.

"But I don't meet a particular Shedite," I say, while Nikostratos, who has never been a Shedite and damn well never will, sits silent beside me on both sides of the couch. The cat's on top of my hand, a silent warm weight with no comments to add. "Maybe some day Eder gets out of Hell, maybe they don't. Probably they don't. Not for some time. And they don't get back to Heaven. I sure as hell don't meet an Impudite of Fire who's about to be sold to a god in the Marches--"

"--I didn't hear about that one," Xio says.

"Long story. Anyway, I don't meet her. Maybe Vaina and Catherine--"

"The kid?"

"Different Catherine. Mercurian of Trade. Anyway, maybe they get out of there, maybe they don't, but I'm pretty sure Luna doesn't. She's just a kid. Either she's eaten or she's trapped. At best she's running scared through the Marches, trying to get back home. She doesn't get to Heaven. She's lucky if she survives."

"Is it better," Xio asks, "if an Impudite survives or not?"

Nik is so very silent beside me. I say, "It depends on who you ask."

"How noncommittal."

"I want everyone saved. Everyone to be their best self. Nobody dies and nobody does terrible things because it seems to be their best option available at the time." I take a sip of my beer. Small and precise. "It's not going to happen, but it's nice to have goals."

"And after the Impudite," Xiomara says. "What's the next turning point?"

"That one." Nik speaks up at last, and the cat curls up against me. Warm and reassuring. She will defend me against anything, and damned if I know what I've done to deserve that. I was no angel, as a demon. Just better than some demons. I was loyal to my people, and even demons can manage that much. "Right there, when you sent the Impudite to Heaven."

"Yeah." No denying it at this point. "That's where I could have gone earlier. I could've followed her home. There's--nothing I can think of, that I know of, that I did after that, which was particularly worthwhile or good for anyone. I did some things I'm not proud of. Nothing good that required me to be a demon. Maybe nothing good at all."

Except for saving Guo, maybe, and I don't know how to explain that to the two of them.

"Why didn't you?" Xiomara knows it's a personal sort of question. The prying, invasive sort of question that I don't want to ask of Outcasts who are only in my office to use the Tether for their own selfish needs. (Practical needs. No one should be stuck with dissonance.) She asks it like that because I'm an angel, and not a human. Not exactly a _person_ , by her standards, but someone close to it, who doesn't take things like a human would.

She's right, anyway.

"Because we all do stupid things for love," I say, "and I don't think I could've left without hurting my partner."

"And maybe you should have," she says.

"Maybe I should have," I say. "This is why I'm glad I don't work for Destiny. Usually I don't have to think about these things, or all the ways they could branch off. And that's just with hindsight. Not trying to predict it in advance."

"Elohim must be the strangest of angels," Xio says. "Is there anything for dessert?"

She's a human, but she's a good one. These things aren't mutually exclusive by a long shot. And it's an excuse for me to stand up. "Ice cream," I say, "if you're not sick of it. Nik?"

"Please," says the Kyriotate.

Maybe we should talk about these things, Nik and I. Or maybe we shouldn't. Some things are easier to deal with by not dealing with them at all.


	8. Taylor & Community Service

When humans decided to name the sensation of endless instability at a person's feet, they didn't get it quite right: they called it "seasick" even though it doesn't require the sea. I kept my hands latched onto the side of the boat, and stared at my wobbling reflection in the water of the river. It wasn't my favorite vessel, and the shaking dark surface didn't improve its looks any.

"The Seneschal's waiting for you just over there," said the boat's owner. Ship's captain. Her vehicle was a big floating rectangle designed for porting containers, not any sort of modern behemoth or pretty antique sailboat, and I found it difficult to take the whole business seriously. But she clearly found the whole job--ferrying a supposed angel out to a point in the river, as if I were freight myself--serious business indeed. She was probably human; I hadn't thought of any polite way to confirm. Soldiers of God all seemed to put on airs, to the same proportion that actual angels wore humble man-of-the-people pretense, which confused the matter.

I still knew who would win if it came down to conflict between the two groups. For all that angels sometimes pretended to let humans lead, that had never yet changed who the masters and the servants really were.

After some wobbly staring until I was sure I wasn't just missing someone standing there in celestial form, I asked, "Where?"

The captain pointed towards--not the horizon, but the water itself. Right over the edge. "You can see her just under the surface. It'll be fine," she added, maybe because my holding-back-nausea face looked like an expression of general terror. "I've used that artifact myself, before. And she's not a hardass like some angels are. She prefers that we not take ships through the locus itself on Tether business for, uh, thematic reasons."

"Thematic reasons." That came out flatter than I meant.

"Hey, I don't try to understand Tethers, I just work around them." She moved over to lean against the railing beside me. "You can leave your shoes here, and anything else you don't want to get wet. Strip down as far as you want. No one can see you on this side, unless they're on the shore with binoculars, in which case we might as well keep their life entertaining. I'll pick you up here when you're done, or my brother will."

I sat down on the deck and peeled my shoes off. I was halfway through unbuttoning my shirt when I remembered what a bad idea that would be. The artifact sitting high on my arm felt so natural there that I could forget its existence, but if someone saw it? If a _Seneschal_ saw it? Even if they didn't know exactly what it was--likely, since I wasn't sure of the details myself--or how I got it, that would raise some questions. Or turn into an outright confiscation. Privilege of the Tether, especially with them doing a favor for the theoretical Outcast I was. I needed to keep that one last ace in the hole for if I ever found the Shepherds; they didn't do anything for free. Exactly what you'd expect for a group associated with Theft and Freedom.

"Do you know what I'm doing down there?" I asked, standing back up on the rocking deck. And here I'd always thought--so far as I'd thought about it, which wasn't very--that rivers were flat and stable. Waves were supposed to be an _ocean_ thing, like beaches and lobster rolls.

"Manual labor," said the captain.

How traditional. I pictured, for a moment, a full kitchen layout somewhere on the riverbed, with wriggling fish just waiting to be gutted. "Of course."

I jumped over the side of the boat before I could spend too much time worrying about it. There had been moments to back out of this plan, and there would be again, but while out on a boat with a Soldier of God, about to meet a Seneschal? It was time to project repentant angel as hard as I could and not worry about the twists I couldn't see coming.

The instant my head sank below the water, I took a gulp of breath. If the artifact wasn't working, I wanted to know _before_ I was flailing twenty meters down. All I got was the taste of unfiltered water, and a breath that felt almost normal. Heavier, but not much wetter: like working in a cold kitchen on a foggy morning, with the back door thrown open for deliveries.

There had been nothing particular to see where the boat's captain pointed to the supposed Seneschal in the water, not from above. With my head underwater, I found myself staring at a white sturgeon weighing at least twice what my vessel did.

I had broken down fish that size before. Not often. It was the sort of procedure that required multiple people and good tools, even aside from the space requirements. Ideally the fish would also, unlike the one in front of me, be dead at the time.

With the artifact strapped to my back, I was anything but buoyant; the fish circled me as I sank down slowly away from the last of the afternoon light overhead.

 _Cleanup at the bottom. Collect any large junk. Prioritize electronics._ The message dropping into my head didn't sound like anyone I knew, so the smart money was on it coming from the Seneschal, currently wearing the body of a fish. It was a wonder Kyriotates didn't all go mad, like the Archangel of Animals, constantly stuck inside bodies that couldn't talk properly. Or at least stick to human hosts whenever they could. I'd never met a Shedim I'd particularly liked, but it was easy to see how someone could get there, starting off as a Kyriotate.

The lights overhead dimmed out. The water looked like nothing in a way absolute darkness alone wouldn't have, in much the same way that mottled gray things hid in dark places better than shiny black things did. (Or so I'd learned in a variety of storage rooms, basements, and the occasional walk-in freezer with malfunctioning lights.) Sound faded the same way the light did: not until there was silence, but until there was a sort of blank nothing, and the hum of my own vessel's blood.

I drew in another mud-flavored breath of water and let myself sink. It was a test, of course. _Those_ I was used to. When my feet finally sank into the silty bottom of the river, I hadn't done anything to embarrass--myself.

I couldn't embarrass my teacher when no one watching knew who that was. After a moment of vicious pleasure at keeping the credit for myself, which meant nothing because no one was about to give me credit for my display of confidence, I dragged a foot across the riverbed to get some bearings. Pleasure was all very nice, but I had to hike into the locus, and then start doing work.

The light of Heaven, concentrated and corporeal-directed version, sizzled across my skin on a Symphonic level when I found the edge of the Tether locus. It felt like--well, it didn't feel like anything, in the same way disturbance didn't really sound like anything; but just as disturbance always came across like rolling thunder, this felt like walking into a pool of fire. No pain: the distinct realization that the metaphor would turn literal if I were stupid enough to drop my vessel and stand in that flow directly.

Not having been raised an idiot, I kept my head down and started looking for junk.

Time slowed and stretched like taffy, until I couldn't tell where it had gone. There was only the dark and the muck and the slow, constant push of the river. The current kept me oriented; between that and the edges of the locus itself, I could always return to center, and find my junk pile again. I dug half a bedframe out of the mud, one of those ancient bulbous TVs, and several other things made of metal or plastic that I couldn't identify by touch alone.

The not-Malakite had told me there would be breaks, but he hadn't promised. They could leave me on the riverbed for a week, two weeks, until I climbed out on my own. Maybe only until I'd completely cleaned the locus. Except "could" didn't have a time limit, only "would", as Unathi used to tell me.

I gouged the heel of my palm pulling something out of the mud, and it stung every time I put weight on that hand afterward.

A sound that wasn't disturbance, but registered in the same way, made no sense to me. I stopped, arms full of a mass of tangled wire (chicken wire or chainlink fence or actual wire, I couldn't tell though I should've been able to pick it out with some attention), and tried to listen more closely.

"Mr. Taylor?"

Blinking helped, even though I wasn't seeing the figure in front of me any more than I was hearing it in the sense of sound waves and ears. For one idiot instant, I thought _Some kid fell in the river._ Logic caught up with me in the next instant. Human children would not be asking polite questions of me by name while underwater, nor did they have wings, and they certainly wouldn't be visible in that level of darkness. What I was seeing (which still wasn't the right word, but it would have to do) was a sort of after-image of bright spots that also happened to be in the shape of a sparkle-winged preteen girl.

With tufted ears like a cat, though, and a distinctly feline shape to her nose. She was--with increasing clarity as I focused on her--not nude in any particular sense, though she wasn't wearing clothing, in much the way Balseraphs and Djinn and Shedim never looked wrong going about unclothed in their native forms.

"Good evening," I said, my words barely comprehensible through the water.

"Now you see me." She swept in, wings spread still behind her. They clearly weren't functional on the corporeal plane, but a decorative sort of attachment while she moved freely through the water. "The Seneschal asked me to come see how you were doing on the cleanup, but I already checked the pile, and it's looking great. You're doing lots better than the last person we had through here. I'd say you should take a shorter shift, but I'm not sure if it still works if you do that. How are you doing?"

I closed my hand against the gouge in my palm. "It's going really well. Sort of boring, but it wouldn't be work if it was fun, would it?"

"There's all sorts of work," she said. She was the kind of bright to look at that would've hurt my eyes, if I'd been seeing her with them. "I like mine. Anyway, classes are over and I usually do my homework first thing in the morning, so I came by to help and pass messages. Want me to look for things for you to haul?"

Help that actually _reduced_ the amount of work I had to do would have been too much to ask for. "Thanks," I said, "I'd appreciate that." I even smiled at her, though I wasn't sure if she could see it in the darkness. Celestial forms on the corporeal plane could see vessels perfectly, even if the reverse was tricky, but probably based on the way things were ordinarily visible. Which I wasn't, very. In some ways it made the acting much easier. I couldn't mug up the right kind of faces, but neither was any moment of unguarded expression going to betray me.

She darted past me. "It might be easier if you took off more clothes. Or would you be cold? And I suppose it would be less human norm. People around here really want you to keep your clothes on. Do you need more clothes, or did you pack some? The last person who did this work didn't have almost any clothing, but the one before that had a whole car of stuff."

"I'm good," I said. On further consideration, I added, "Do you think I could get some work gloves?"

"Oh--yes! You should have those. You should've gotten them from--" The proto-angel spun around in front of me, frowning. The expression was almost unnatural on her face. "The Mercurian who used to handle that had to go back to Heaven, and I'm not sure Leo knew, so maybe the captain didn't tell you when you were on the boat, because she figured you'd already been told by someone else. I'm sorry, really. It's sort of been a mess here since the Mercurian left."

Mess was good. Mess meant not a lot of coordinated attention towards potential infiltrators. (I was an infiltrator, though I didn't feel much like one. It felt a lot less like being a spy and a lot more like being the mouse in the walls.) I waved away the apology, and remembered she couldn't see me very well. "I should've thought to ask. Why did the Mercurian leave?"

"I don't know," she said. "They used to run most of the corporeal side of things, because the Seneschal isn't very good with this set of people. But something happened, and they went back to Heaven for a while. They might not be coming back for years, or ever. HR told me that it was a personal thing, and private, and not something dangerous, so I haven't asked, though I did _wonder_ some. But it means they left right when Leo was showing up, and he's been trying to do security and management and errands for Waterways all at the same time. _He_ says it's not a problem, but I think it'd be tricky. Once I fledge, and my Role graduates, I'll take over the management side, anyway."

"He seems to be doing fine with security," I said, as if I wasn't particularly concerned either way.

"I guess! It's not much of a thing. Not a lot of people bother us. He sort of has this running feud with the Windies, where you can't really tell if he hates them or he's flirting with them, over whether or not they can get past his surveillance stuff. And of course Nik helps, which he says isn't cheating, just using available resources efficiently." She leaned over my shoulder; I found I was grateful she wasn't leaning through. "There's something down there, about a foot--about, um, a third of a meter in front of you."

I shuffled forward until I hit it. My feet were covered in stinging nicks; the human who'd suggested I take my shoes off either hadn't realized what I would be doing down here, or had a nasty sense of humor I wanted to talk to her about. "You don't like the metric system?"

"I learned imperial for work in this country, but Leo says metric's better because it's all decimal, just like a measurement system for a language that counts in base ten should be. So I'm trying to swap." She sank down into the ground, pointing out the edges of the junk while I got my hands wrapped around a bar of it. "I'm sorry I can't help more, but we only have the one breathing thing. I think there's a rock on that."

I couldn't see any such rock, but some tugging confirmed that something was holding it down. "I appreciate the thought," I lied, as sweetly as I could.

It took some interminable number of minutes, and working with a lever salvaged from the pile of junk I'd already put together, to get the rock moved enough that I could pull out the--bicycle frame, was my guess, with tires and soft parts long gone. The little angel (who had, I realized suddenly, just as many Forces as I did, even with no Choir yet) was a font of chatter and not particularly useful advice. I put up the best I could.

I'd put up with much worse. It was hardly even a chore.

She tried to turn the conversation toward what I'd done before arriving at the Tether, and I dodged the subject as delicately as I could. Any organization that believed in multi-page questionnaires was not going to believe in personal privacy as well. It wasn't as if Hell was a great respecter of privacy, but we were much better at pretending to it.

"I haven't done anything half as interesting as the other people at the Tether," she told me; talking about everyone else's past seemed to keep her almost as entertained as asking after mine. "The Seneschal's been here since so far back that she's still got a grudge against people who speak European languages, and when she uses a host who can talk, mostly on weekends for paperwork stuff, she tells the most amazing stories. And Nik did all sorts of things back in the 60s, and of course Leo's been into Tethers of practically every Word that's still around, even though he's technically younger than me, and even if he _says_ that most of them he didn't set on fire, you know he got up to exciting things." She puffed out a celestial sigh while I was trying to work out how often Trade was _expected_ to set Tethers on fire; I'd always heard of them as one of the Words that tried to talk everything out first, like Flowers and Lust. "He's so dreamy! I start babbling whenever I talk to him. It makes me sound like I'm four all over again."

Reassuring small, ignorant people that their crushes were reasonable and reciprocal was actually within my skillset, even if I'd mostly used it on waitresses before. I also got confirmation--or at least a second statement of fact--that the angel in question was really, truly not a Malakite. No matter how much setting Tethers on fire sounded like a Malakite's job, if anyone in Trade meant to do such things.

When the dark shape of the Seneschal slipped past the two of us in the water, I wondered if I'd said something wrong. There was no way of knowing social norms among angels; those had to differ from how humans acted together, the same way demons didn't treat each other the same in private places as they did in front of unAware human witnesses. But the littlest angel said, "Your shift's over. Let me help you find the rope!"

I rose through the water into a different kind of darkness. The lights on the shore were all dim, and dawn was creeping up somewhere far enough beyond the horizon that it was only a suggestion of gray outlining the city. A man I hadn't seen before--human, probably, and the previous woman's brother--helped me unstrap the artifact from my back, and offered me a stack of towels.

He didn't have much to say to me, and I didn't have much to say to him. I toweled myself dry in the surreal, silent atmosphere. The infant angel had gone back to doing whatever it was she did for the Tether under the water, and I had no requirements on my time for however long they chose to give me a break.

The sword that was pretending to be a bracelet burned against my skin. Not enough to make me twitch. Enough that I noticed, and wondered if I'd woken something up by submerging it that long. But it just--burned and itched, and then subsided again, so I didn't have to do anything incriminating, like kill the Seneschal's servant, to hide what was going on.

I couldn't, was the problem. That man was almost certainly a human. And I'd walked right into a Tether that seemed half staffed with humans, when I thought angels would be the real problem.

Quite likely the best thing for me to do would be to leave the boat, walk casually back towards that office, and disappear between the two points. To be another Outcast who couldn't handle the work, even to get rid of dissonance. They wouldn't go looking, if I didn't take anything from the Tether. Not to get back some used clothing and demand to know what I was doing.

Except that the worst they might do to me, even if they found out, still seemed a lot easier to deal with than whatever Unathi might do with me if it caught up. After all, it might not kill me. It might decide I could stay a student, so long as I learned better.

I walked right back to that office, and waited at the back door until someone came to let me in.


	9. In Which I Take Care Of Standard Workplace Maintenance Tasks

Nik watches me critically from the cat.

"I'm never going to be as good at aiming this as I was with my resonance," I say, and buckle on the holster under her stare. "There's fiddly detail work with resonance. Bullets aren't good for anything but shooting people."

Nik hunches her shoulders up, tail lashing. She looks an awful lot like the cat does on its own, that way.

"I date a _Seraph_. Sometimes I even think honesty is the best policy." I pull a jacket on over my holster and mottled gray shirt. Nothing so sharp as I wear to the day job: this is the kind of work that calls for dark clothing and suspicious lurking in places that might require hasty exits. "So let's be honest. I miss the Calabite resonance, even if I miss nothing else about the state." Which isn't true, but _complete_ honesty is not called for her. "Guns are a lousy substitute, and I don't trust them. A sniper rifle, maybe, if what I want to do is kill a specific person, but that's not how my job goes. Hasn't for years. And I'm only bringing it along because you're my security detail, and I'd be an idiot not to listen to you when it comes to personal security. So, look. I have it."

I grab the bag of office supplies on my way out the door, while the cat glares at me.

At the car, she's waiting in an owl. I let her inside so that she doesn't have to try to keep up with my driving--no one's laying speed traps in the routes I'll be taking at this time of night--and then get moving. Night driving's a whole different world from driving during the day, especially between midnight and four when the world's gone quiet. There's a tiny story attached to every other vehicle on the road. Even if it's just _on the way home from the bar_ or _trucking through the night_ , as the case might be.

I'm not a Mercurian to figure these things out by looking at people. It's all speculation, and a newfound appreciation for the fact that other people are just as real as I am. Which is not something I thought would be a _surprise_ , when I redeemed (and I'm still not sure how reflexive or passive or what that verb is), but here we are. Every damn person out there is just as real as I am, with just as much of an inner life and all that shit. It's enough to boggle the mind if I think about it at too much length. I mean--there are billions of humans alone, without even getting into demons and angels and the weird fuzzy aspects of ethereals and animals.

I didn't even know I was a solipsist until I broke out of it. Sometimes it still catches me by surprise.

The owl's quiet and the streets are quiet, half the stoplights turned to flashing yellow or red at this time of night, and I'm pretty quiet too, caught up in my own thoughts. I slip on the glasses Penny sent me--no telling when I'll be spying on conversations, right?--and leave the car three blocks away from warehouse I'm checking out, in the parking lot to a bar I've been to a few times. (Decent beer, but nothing to write home about. Tedious sports-focused atmosphere. Not my kind of place unless they step up their barbecue game or turn off the TVs.) The place is still open--no mandatory closing for half an hour--but sparsely populated on a weeknight.

I may give too much thought to where I can leave a car without anyone noticing it, and expect to find it again a few hours later. Some habits die hard. You'd think it would be the Fire habits that would take the longest to go, given I was made in that Word and raised in it, but no, it's Theft that sticks around. Maybe because Fire was natural and Theft I had to learn.

Well. Let's be honest. Theft I was _taught_ , and I've always been pretty good at picking up on instruction when my teacher's putting any real effort into making sure it sticks. So there's a lot of overlap in the mindset between how I used to do Theft jobs with my now very former partner, and how I'm heading in towards this warehouse that might not be any problem at all.

Nik's not half as good at stealing things, but she's better at the literal form of watching my back. There's an owl in the sky somewhere near me as I walk down the street, and if I can't see her, neither can anyone else.

Stealth is built of two things: not being seen (or heard) in the first place, and looking like you belong if anyone picks up on you being there. The second part's a lot easier in my current vessel. Sometimes I'm surprised anyone bothers to take female vessels, unless their job absolutely demands it. Nik says she'd rather be female if she's got the choice, which may not be that different from how I'd rather be male, but damn if it's not a lot easier to escape notice this way than the other. At least it's easier to be good-looking in the one vessel than the other.

No one has any reason to look twice at some guy walking from one bar to another, and once I'm walking down a street that has no bars on it, there's no one around to look the first time.

Tonight's investigative target is one of a series of warehouses that were stamped out of the same mold several decades ago. A few have acquired additions, and one in the row burnt down and was replaced by something more modern, but the others are all squat, minimally functional examples of an era that didn't believe in heating or cooling spaces intended to hold crates and working-class men. Give this city another decade of steady expansion, and they'll all be converted into condos that can stare back across the river at mine. The waterfront's less about business and more about tourism every year, according to the Seneschal.

She doesn't like it, but neither does she dislike it enough to try to push back. Her Tether has been shaken by worse population shifts than that, and tourism falls under Trade as easily as shipping does.

The warehouse in question is not in any immediate danger of being overtaken by yuppies. Or ravers, as the one that burnt down apparently got. (Once upon a time I would've been very interested in whether anyone was killed in that fire. These days, I'm not that interested in history that's not attached to my job.) It's a dull piece of unimaginative architecture, and I can boost myself in through a high window without using any equipment fancier than I carry in my pockets. It's enough to make me wonder why I bother packing along a bag of office supplies.

I drop down onto a second story catwalk silently enough to do my old partner proud. Not that he would've been; I don't think he was ever particularly happy when he couldn't find something wrong in me for him to fix. But that's Djinn for you. I like to think that's a Band feature, rather than particular to him.

Now. At this point the Ofanite thing to do would be to keep right on moving, and start poking through the contents of the warehouse for more details about what's going on in here. Fortunately, redemption didn't strip me of sense or patience--maybe a little of the patience, sure, but not _all_ of it--so I crouch down at the edge of the catwalk, and watch the space below.

And when I'm bored with that, which takes about fifteen seconds these days, I stand up and tap the window. The kind of small sound that would never be noticed during the day, and might come from either side of it, but anyone set to guard the place at night--

\--and it _does_ get me a hint of movement, down below, so I Sing myself invisible. And then, because the Ofanite thing goes a lot deeper than I always like to admit, I swing right over that catwalk's shoddy railing and drop down to the warehouse floor. Time to go hunting.

Catch and release only, on this trip. Honest.

Ultimately, this isn't a fair contest. I'm an angel of the Lord (officially, with paperwork that says so and everything), and what's creeping around the warehouse is a blobby thing with enormous ears and watering yellow eyes. It skulks and sniffs, and could be taken for a tiny Djinn in the wrong light. The warehouse light is wrong enough that I might even think that, if it weren't spending so much time in celestial form. A proper demon, no matter how small, can't hold onto its true form on the corporeal for long, no more than angels can. Gremlins, like relievers, can sit around in their true form for--days, I would say, but I'm sure some do it even longer. Months. Decades, if they're lucky enough to get a real job and live through it.

So much for this warehouse being home to nothing more serious than weed dealers.

I pace along behind the demonling on its rounds, and follow it up the catwalk to where it sniffs around the window I came through. Closed, now, but the demonling sticks its head through--easy enough when you're not in physical form, on the physical plane--to check for incipient intruders as well. The kid's trying to do its job, and I'm trying to guess its Word.

When you find a warehouse with a cover story and a demonic guard, there are a few Princes who spring immediately to mind. The Game, fond of covert ops of all types. Fire, mercenaries and weapon dealers to the world. The War, again with the weapons dealers, and eager to make inroads on Heavenly territory. Theft, because, come on, warehouses of suspicious goods? When is that not of interest to Theft? Sometimes in the sense of swiping it from one of the other Princes of Hell, but that's infernal politics for you.

The demonling isn't wearing anything that looks like uniform or status marker. That reduces the chances of the War and the Game, but doesn't rule out either. Nothing particularly scorched about it, so maybe not Fire; demonlings bound to a Prince's service tend to reflect it, before they've got enough Forces to look like their own permanent selves. And Theft--well. Theft is fond of looking like other things. But this doesn't seem much like a safehouse. Frankly, we had better security.

Whoever it is, they're too close for comfort. Theft, we can probably leave them be, with an eye on what sort of goods they're moving through. (A little faux Gucci smuggling isn't a problem. Human trafficking? Problem. I do work for a Mercurian, after all.) Any of the other three we're going to have more of a problem with. And there's always the outside chance that this is an operation for someone else entirely, like Lust or Dark Humor or Secrets, though what the hell Dark Humor would bother to stash in warehouses and set guards on, I don't know. Something ironic.

I let myself out by the same window, when the demonling isn't looking that way. And then, with a countdown for the Song's expiration in my head, I go running.

I'm not running to anything, exactly. Just running away from the warehouse, far enough that a half-blind watchdog like that won't catch any of the disturbance when the Song lets go of me. If I were visible I'd have to worry about explaining myself to humans: running like this at night, with nothing that looks like jogging gear, gets questions asked when people notice. But for a minute and a half yet, I'm invisible to the world.

The night air still tastes like summer, though it's a month too late for that. Autumn has to hit soon.

I drop to a walk a second before Ethereal Form peels off me. The disturbance is enough to catch Nik's attention, and she's a dark shape in the sky above me again before I have my cell phone out and I've figured out who I feel like calling. Nakhal, on account of them being the person watching out for this Tether who isn't as busy as an Archangel, and who actually keeps a cell phone on hand.

One of these days I'm getting a fish-operable waterproof cell phone for the Seneschal. But I don't think I can afford to ask Lightning for favors like that quite yet. A pity that Animal's so grouchy in their direction; Kyriotates would benefit from more animal testing on new technology interfaces.

"So we have a demon problem," I say, once I'm sure the right person has answered.

"You're okay?"

"Yeah, clean in and out." Once upon a time I would've been offended at the question; I'm a professional, even if I'm not very good at saying what _kind_ of professional anymore. These days, I know they just mean it as concern for me. "One gremlin in the warehouse, on watch. Watching what is going to require some more work, if you care."

"I care, but I don't think we care enough to call in the guns yet. Unless you think it's that kind of threat?"

"Nothing near. Serious threats put better security on the place."

"Tell the Seneschal, and keep an eye on it."

"What do you want me to do if it starts blowing up?"

"Literal explosions, or situational?"

"Either," I say, the memory of several entertaining explosions flitting through my head. I haven't set anything important on fire in some time. Judgment and other such boring people would probably approve.

"Do what you think needs doing, Leo. I trust your judgment."

I'm pretty sure they're telling the truth about that, even. Which is--odd? Standard? Something I should expect by now. I don't know. I circle the block I've reached, and head back toward the car. One more human strolling through the night, as far as anyone who isn't looking up for Kyriotate spotters is likely to tell.

"You see," I tell Nik at the car. "I didn't need to shoot anyone. Perfectly safe."

She can be remarkably expressive for someone currently possessing a small brown owl.


	10. In Which I Deal With Inconvenient Allies

The text from Captain Sullivan (the elder of the two) shows up while I'm stuck on the bridge during my morning commute, which means there's not a damn thing I can do to arrive at the office before the Windies. Nothing legal and advisable, anyway, and I try to keep my law-breaking for work purposes and special occasions. Nothing for mere personal convenience, unless, you know, there's a really pressing reason beyond _fuck you and your fucking chaos in my city_. No one above me in the flowchart has insisted, but I'm trying to be more proactive these days. And sticking to the law is just plain practical when you have a Role to protect.

Not that the Game can't fuck you over in a heartbeat despite all innocence, if they put their minds to it. But the mortal authorities are slightly less likely to do so, especially if you look like the sort of person they consider default in the local environment.

I leave my car in the usual place, and try not to double-check that I've locked it. Like _that_ ever helps.

"You're late," Justin says, the instant I walk in. "Don't you find that ironic?" There's a woman seated on his desk--narrow, quick-eyed, familiar in a way I can't quite place--and a middle-aged man with a sharp smile pacing around the edges of the reception area. I would not take either of them for tourists even without the warning.

"I blame the forces of Hell," I say, and flash a smile at the two Windies. "So nice to meet you. If there's anything you need, just let me know. I'm happy to help."

"Wow," says the woman on the desk. She hops down, hands tucked behind her back. "I don't even have to resonate that one." Seraph, from statement and movement both, with enough corporeal experience to not stand out blatantly as one, but definitely the movement habits of someone who usually doesn't have those body parts.

"And we haven't even done anything yet," says the man, as he circles behind me. "That you know of."

"It's always a pleasure to meet more people from your Word," I say. I do _not_ turn to watch the man, even when he brushes right past my back. They take too much pleasure out of being provocative, and I'm not quite condescending enough to indulge them in it.

"Owww," says the Seraph, and squints at me. "Are you doing that on purpose?"

"I would never do that."

"We don't even need anything," says the Windy at my back, who's decided to stop right there and wait for me to twitch. He'll be waiting a while. "We only stopped in to see if we could lend a hand, as long as we're here."

"Nothing springs to mind," I said, and almost regretted that this was the truth. Not because I wanted a pair of chaos-loving pickpockets sticking their fingers in my business, but because the Seraph looked slightly relieved when I said that. You'd think a Windy would be a little more used to lies. "Lovely to see you! Stop by any time."

The Seraph rolls her eyes at me, quite dramatically. It goes well with her vessel, which looks more adolescent than adult. "You're being difficult," she says, "but you probably have your reasons, so I'm not going to hold it against you, though I will _totally_ remember. That's Vrej behind you, Elohite of the Wind, and I'm--" She stops short as the door to the souvenir shop opens.

Taylor follows Olivia in, and stops short at the sight of the increasingly crowded reception. His expression settles immediately into polite-and-deferential, which is interesting. It's a sort of customer service look. Most Mercurians go for something a little more chummy, even when they're in actual customer service positions.

"Windies, Olivia. She's a reliever working here. Be nice." I wave a hand between the two groups, while Vrej slinks over to stand beside his Seraph. "Olivia, a pair of Windies. Axiomatically, they won't be here long. Taylor, same all around. I'll try to let everyone here know if someone _not_ in the know walks into the room."

"It's a surprisingly aware morning," Justin says, and leans in with his chin propped in his hands. "Quick, someone let slip a secret about Heaven that I'm not supposed to know yet."

"Taylor just needed more clothes," Olivia says brightly, "because he's doing all his dissonance work underwater." And at some point in the near future, I'm going to take her aside and discuss the concept of personal privacy, which is not something they cover in sufficient detail in reliever classes. Apparently. "So we're going back to the dress-up room! I'm going to hit Goodwill after class to do a refill. Does anyone else want new old clothes?"

" _I_ do," says the Seraph, while Taylor edges discreetly towards the staircase. "Do you have any sorts of leg sheaths for knives?"

"I can check!"

Vrej is either less interested in sartorial updates than his partner, or more interested in spreading the harassment evenly over all available Tether personnel, because he sticks around in the lobby while those three trudge upstairs. "There's a storm rolling in," he says. "You'll want to batten down tonight. What _does_ your boss have against Windies?" All of this is directed quite pointedly at Justin, our token human in the building at this time of day.

"He's not my boss," Justin says. "There's a chart. We've been over this. He's just in charge of security."

"Strictly," I say. "Nothing to do with giving orders."

"Right," Justin says. "Hey, boss! I called those people you told me to, but I'm not getting any response at all, and they don't have any kind of message service. Do you want me to keep trying?"

"Speaking in a completely non-authoritarian capacity, yes. See if you can get through."

The Elohite turns a smile on me. I don't like it. Everything Elohim do is for manipulation, and you can't trust their friendliness any more than you can trust what they say. At least Habbalah are honest about their own subjectivity. "Do you want _us_ to take a look at whoever's not answering?"

And that's something I can't brush off glibly, because it's a good question. Do I want someone else to take on the hassle of tracking down people I want a few answers from? Wouldn't mind it; I still enjoy travel, but the Tether isn't so heavily staffed that I'm comfortable leaving it alone for long.

Do I want the _Wind_ doing it, though? Trade's officially friendly towards them, and they've never returned the favor. They might save me a lot of trouble. They might forget what I asked them to do, and run off to do something more entertaining. They might go ask the questions for me, and come back to tell me lies because it's fair turn-about for what I said to the Seraph five minutes ago.

Sometimes I wish Heaven had a lot more Lilim. You know where you stand, with them.

"I don't suppose Texas was in your flight plan."

"It could be," says the Elohite. Behind him, Justin spins a pen, and watches the both of us keenly. Behold the interaction of angels of two different tribes, in their not-quite-native habitat. We are, I suppose, doing the celestial equivalent of wary sniffing, but haven't worked up to tail-wagging yet.

It makes me wish Nik were here to be gruff and blunt with people. But imagine how crowded the place would be when the upstairs party came back down.

"Don't worry about it," I say. "The offer of supplies is honest, in any case. We're not swamped with resources, but we have all the standards, and I'm up for negotiation if you want something pricy."

"And you could cut me a great deal?"

"Are you kidding? I'd nickel-and-dime you for everything I could. Where's the fun in it otherwise?" This isn't entirely true. But the Seraph's not around to say otherwise.

The Elohite nods thoughtfully, and I refuse to be drawn into second-guessing anything I've said. "If you ever want to change your mind about the Wind," he says, "we do great road trips."

"I've had enough of those for a lifetime, thanks."

And then Vrej looks smug, which reminds me why I usually _avoid_ conversations with his Choir. "Do keep the weather warning in mind. You'll be losing some trees along that greenbelt I saw up the river."

"You're sure I can't interest you in any office supplies? There are these squirrels, for example. Very fuzzy. Great for passing Kyriotates."

"Those are not office supplies," Justin says.

"There was a memo. They're office supplies." I turn a bright, sharp smile on the Elohite, and, okay, I am _mostly_ a good person these days, but it's nice to watch him blink. Even if I'm not imitating Valefor as closely as I used to with that particular expression. "Anything you need. Within reason."

"Cash?"

"I assumed you had already helped yourself."

"Company," Vrej says sunnily.

"That you'll have to recruit on your own." And since he's not a Cherub, I don't have to find a polite way to word the bit where I threaten to break his fingers if he attunes to Justin. Company employees are not fungible and they do not go out on loan, no matter what passing Windies might find convenient or exciting.

"I like my mundane rut," Justin says hastily. "It's a very nice rut. Comfortable. It gets good wifi signal."

"That's probably everything," Vrej says. He smiles right back at the both of us, and saunters out the door.

"Try not to let that Seraph walk out of here with anything worth more than a grand," I tell Justin, and follow the damn Elohite out the door before he can run off with my car.


	11. Taylor & Inconvenient Truths

I said absolutely nothing of substance to that Seraph, and I was sure she had noticed. There was no way to give noncommittal answers time and again to someone who was prying, and she _did_ pry, in exactly the way the not-Malakite downstairs had explicitly declined to. Even the baby angel was starting to make distressed noises of subject change before that Seraph peeled away, with her arms full of clothing and a smile I hated.

There were plenty of angels to worry about more than Seraphim, in a physical sense. Malakim, of course. Cherubim. But Seraphim were the worst when it came to keeping secrets. I only had one secret to keep, but it was a big enough one all on its own.

"Windies always seem to have so much fun," Olivia said, hanging at the window. 

I went to stand beside her, the way someone amiable would. There wasn't much of amiable in me at the moment, but I couldn't think of much better than a naive baby angel to work as cover for whatever people might think of me otherwise. In my experience, children and animals were no better than adults at judging character, and often much worse, but local cultural custom said that the young knew better. If the local angels believed the same, all the better for me.

"They don't look like they're having fun," I said. It looked, in fact, much more like the local Ofanite was having an argument with the second of the Wind Servitors, down in a parking lot.

"They travel all sorts of places, and do exciting things," Olivia said, and heaved a melodramatic sigh. "It must make for such stories."

"Have you heard many?"

"Plenty! But mostly in Heaven. Here on the corporeal, none of them passing through have time to talk. They just drop through the Tether and run."

Down in the parking lot, the Windies piled into a car, and drove away with Leo staring after them exactly as if he was making sure they left the area before he dared turn his back on them. I had seen a very similar expression, once, from a Kobalite dealing with a pack of Magpies. It stood to reason that the angelic version of Theft would draw similar reactions from people with property to watch over. And, on reflection, from idealistic young celestials who hadn't learned yet that "excitement" was usually a euphemism for near-death experiences.

"They must have so much work to do," I said.

"That must be it." Olivia gave another little sigh at the window, this one her _he's so dreamy_ version. I'd heard enough of those already to pick it out from the other type. "Do you want to go anywhere with me, on your break? Since I don't have any classes today, I'll be biking--well, I could walk, if you wanted to come with me? Leo says that walking through the city is a great way to get a feel for it, more than driving through. You see more when you move more slowly, and have to be more careful about what affects you, not just what you could affect by accident."

I found a way to politely decline a day of walking on blisters without giving the impression that I didn't want to spend more time with the girl. Pretending to be an angel was exhausting, and not only because of the deception. Apparently a Mercurian was expected to be not only an extrovert, but a downright gregarious one, ready to leap at any chance to make friends or help out another person.

The chance I leapt on instead was the opportunity to shut myself up in that room of spare clothes with a battered laptop, and stream episodes of _Friends_ for five hours. There was a time when I'd watched the show as education. This is how you act human. This is how you act American. This is how you convince people that you're on their side, no matter what you get out of them and how little you give back. But after a little distance from that time, I found that the show was something like a friend itself. All those idiot humans kept running around and making mistakes because they couldn't figure out how to go after what they really wanted.

I wasn't always sure what I wanted, but I knew what I _didn't_ want, and I'd done a good job of avoiding that, hadn't I?

The bracelet that was sometimes a sword itched, high up on my arm where I'd left it. I pulled it down, and turned it around in my fingers while the dialogue I already knew by heart played out of tinny laptop speakers. Most likely it was more trouble than it was worth. If I thought there was any chance of buying my way clear of Unathi by sending the blessed thing back, I would've mailed it to one of my old teacher's properties, and called quits with the whole thing.

But of course nothing was that easy. Unathi didn't believe in letting loose ends dangle. It had told me stories of vengeance carried out so long after the initial offense that the people who had offended it didn't even remember the incident. Of course, Unathi had reminded them. I didn't expect I'd be allowed to forget any of my faults, either, if it caught up with me.

_If_ was a word to put a lot of weight on. No one was willing to give me sixteen takes in the studio until I could deliver witty lines in exactly the right cadence, and resolve all problems by the end of the episode.

Meanwhile, the itching of the bracelet was getting no better. It tingled against my fingers, as if it meant to do something. Probably nothing good.

There was a knock on the door--the real one in the room I was sitting in, not the apartment on the laptop screen--and I was so startled I nearly dropped the artifact. "Yes?" I called, and shoved the bracelet into the pocket of my new much-used jacket. Vintage was the kindest word for it, but at least its pockets were deep.

The door opened, and there was the Ofanite, an elbow propped against the doorframe. "The storm's building up," he said, "and Sullivan needs to know now if you want to wait it out underwater in the river, or here."

"Sullivan?" I caught up with context. For example, the heavy drops of rain splattering against the window, which must have been falling there for several minutes already. "The captain, right. Would it be safe underwater?"

"That deep? Probably as safe as anywhere," he said. "Maybe that's not saying much." He had a fast smile, there and gone, as if he was thinking of things that were--exciting, as Olivia would've put it. "You can do your shift in paperwork here in the office. It's near enough to the Tether locus to count for...metaphysical things." His gesture there was a bit vague. "Your call."

Lightning lit up the room: a flash, and gone. I was so tired of being wet, soaked through in all my terrible borrowed clothes, and fumbling around in the darkness at the bottom of a river. "Paperwork? If I could?" Thunder overwrote my second question, which should've been a sentence. Unless Outcast angels were supposed to be tentative? My not quite boyfriend wasn't the best model for how to play at being an Outcast, except for the part where I was supposed to be pretending to be him quite specifically. I kept forgetting that bit. If I had to play-act, I wanted to be faking someone more interesting. Or a version of myself who was acceptable to the people I needed something from.

And how would strangers know the difference, anyway?

"It's all yours," he said. "How do you feel about filing?" He left the doorway for the hall; I took it as an invitation to follow, and left that episode right in the middle of trouble with a literal monkey. That wasn't about to change or go anywhere without me.

"Does anyone like filing?"

"You'd be surprised," he said. "Was that Seraph harassing you?"

"Is it the thing where I keep answering questions with more questions?"

That got me another smile, and one that seemed to be a lot less about past excitement. "I've been there myself. Wind is... They do useful work for Heaven. I'm told."

I could not for the life of me remember if Stone was supposed to like Wind or not. Yes? On account of being elemental Words, and sort of violence? There hadn't been much reason to study _Heavenly_ politics at any length, when there were so many complicated arrangements in Hell to memorize. In any case, I didn't leap to the defense of the Word, and Leo didn't press the issue, so we got to walk back into his office without any awkward discussions where we pretended to match our respective Superiors' official political stances.

"Sometimes," he said, "I think we keep all these papers just to give people a way to feel useful." He pulled open the top drawer of a filing cabinet. "One of these days Lightning will give us an actual paperless office so that we can just find things by searching for keywords. Until then, we have alphabetization. I need everything more than seven years old pulled out of all these folders, sorted by category, then boxed up again."

"Are there any Words in Heaven you _like_?" I asked, and immediately regretted the question. It wasn't deferential, or very angelic.

But he laughed, and said, "I've never had anything against Animals," and let me get to work without more commentary.

The rain fell harder, and lightning kept on cracking in the distance. The angel left me at one point, and came back to note that he'd sent the staff home before the storm got any worse. I wasn't enough of a threat to need a minder in his office for a five minute absence, or there wasn't anything in his office that needed protecting. I couldn't tell which. Either Trade didn't have very high security standards, or they were so good at hiding things I hadn't even noticed anything they cared to protect.

Except for their baby angel, maybe. No one had said anything directly about her status, but they didn't treat her like gremlins usually were in Tethers. She was treated like--I couldn't think of a good example. Like an Impudite's favorite human pet. I'd never been allowed any of my own, but I had seen other people keep them, ones they treated almost like friends, and petted and dressed up and protected from other demons. Unathi had always said it was a silly use of one's time and feelings, but then in the next breath that everyone needed a hobby.

It approved more of constructive hobbies than those. Humans weren't constructive. They were unreliable and fragile and prone to dropping dead if you didn't treat them very carefully. No one ever babied demonlings the way one had to take care of even a human that wasn't much liked, just more useful alive than dead. And people in the Tether treated Olivia like she was more valuable than that. She might've been someone's personal project. They said angels did that: peeling off bits of themselves to make new angels, since their Archangels wouldn't make them any without a demonstrative sacrifice.

I sorted papers and listened to the thunder, and tried not to stare too much at the angel in the same room as me. I was getting _used_ to the proximity. Easier on the nervous, but probably not as safe. He stared at his computer, or walked around the office staring at his phone, and didn't bother me. Very ordinary. I could almost take him for a human.

Lightning shot white light through the room, and thunder followed so closely I couldn't space the two moments apart. A heartbeat later, the lights went out, and a horrific whine started up from under the desk.

"Well," Leo said, raising his voice to be heard over rain and whine, "at least the UPS works."

I stood up, and wished for--I didn't even know what. Being closed up in a dark room with an angel was not how I'd meant to spend any evening in the near future. "The delivery service?"

"Uninterrupted power supply." He was a dark shape in the room, moving over to the desk. "That _helpful_ noise lets you know it's time to save files and turn off the computer." The screen's light snapped off, and then the whine. "The last bolt must've hit a transformer. Maybe this'll teach me to complain about Jean's policies in the middle of a thunderstorm."

"And here everyone says Elohim have the steadiest tempers."

"That transformer probably had it objectively coming. Do you know--" He stopped as his phone lit up with a chirp. "I'd better take this."

I nodded, and realized I had no idea if he could see me or not.

"I'm fine," he said to the phone. "It's--no, I'm _fine_ , you have work to do. It's not worth risking a host after." He huffed out a breath that was only a little irritable. "Tell you what, if anyone attacks me, I'll call. You don't need to--Nik, it's starting to _hail_. Keep your hosts inside and go do cop things. Some idiot's bound to drive a car into a meter-deep puddle and need rescuing at this rate."

His shape moved across the edge of the room. Pacing, maybe. That was an Ofanite thing to do.

"Sure," he said. "I will. Take care." He shoved the phone away, its square of light vanishing again. The sun hadn't quite set yet, but the sky outside wasn't letting in much more illumination, and for a moment that phone had been the brightest thing in the room, up by his face. He'd put those glasses back on while I was busy with paperwork. "Looks like it's you and me until the storm clears, Taylor."

"What about Olivia?" That seemed like the right kind of thing to say.

"She's at home. But if she gets into trouble, she'll just drop her vessel and go kick around with the Seneschal until things quiet down." He turned my way; I couldn't make out his expression in the darkness. "Do you want a flashlight for filing in the dark, or do you want to come along for an adventure in wiring?"

"What kind of adventure is this one?"

"The one where I find out why the fuck the emergency lighting I had installed hasn't come on." A glimmer of white from his face might have been a grin. "Want to come along?"

I couldn't think of any way to say no.

Besides, I wasn't sure if sitting alone in the dark was any less intimidating than following a not-Malakite through the dark halls of a Tether-owned building. I wasn't a demonling, to be spooked by things lurking in the shadows, but if I had wanted to kidnap someone from a place like this--it wasn't outside the scope of the sorts of tasks Unathi had set to us as hypotheticals, in training exercises--a power outage, natural or not, would've been a good time for it. And if I disappeared suddenly, who would come looking for me? Outcasts probably ran away after a day of work all the time, when they had a fresh change of clothes and a new distaste for manual labor. No one would think twice about it.

I kept close to Leo's heels, and made sure my footsteps were distinct. It was probably nothing. But he would notice if I disappeared from _that_.

Down on the ground floor, he grabbed a wooden chair from some room, and dragged it into the hallway. "Give me a light," he said, and tossed me something I missed catching. By the time I'd found the tiny flashlight on the floor, he was already standing on the chair. Or, more precisely, with one foot on the chair's back and another on the seat, balancing it on its back two legs at a precarious angle that still got him higher than standing on the seat would've.

"Don't you have ladders?"

"Oh, somewhere," he said. "Point that up here, would you?"

I aimed the light at the box wedged into the corner. "So what's the problem?"

He made a temporizing noise, swaying a little in that perfectly balanced point on two legs of a chair. It wasn't what I had expected of an Ofanite, but maybe they were all like that. As still as Calabim between bouts of destruction, but better on their feet. It didn't seem like much of a trade for the explosions. My Prince--the Prince I _used to_ serve, and might've still been with if I could've extracted myself from my teacher and stuck with the general Word--could have destroyed the whole building with an idle thought.

But didn't. That was the crack in the war that let people like me wiggle out of it, at least for a while. Princes and Archangels didn't run around on raging destructive crusades. If they tried, everyone else jumped on their heads. I'd learned the lessons of Legion, destroyed by Heaven and Hell together for being too good at its job, and Uriel, undercut and removed by his own side for much the same reason. Politics were all about balance. And sometimes balance meant letting people like me run without much pursuit, because we just weren't worth the trouble.

"Squirrels," he said. And, "Fuck," as a spark flashed by his hands. "Hold that steady, _would_ you?"

"Sorry." I raised the light. "Squirrels?"

"Fuzzy little bastards are chewing through things again. I would have Nik get them out of the building, but she claims it would put them in a worse position to be removed, so... Office supplies."

"Office supplies?" I echoed.

"Never mind. Something of a--" He twisted something, snapped out a muffled curse in what sounded a lot more like Helltongue than English, and pale lights lit all along the hall. "...local joke," he finished, and dropped down to the ground, catching the chair as he landed before it could topple over. "That's not your usual vessel, is it?"

"What?" I should've said something more suave, but I was caught between pretending to someone twitchier than me and actual twitchiness.

I was still trying to come up with a smoother cover when he said, "Wrong body language. Not constantly, so don't worry about that. You're pretty good in that one. But when you're distracted, you read wrong." He pulled open a door, and shoved the chair in without looking where it went. "It's none of my business."

"No," I said, "it's not my usual one."

"Who are you running from?"

I wanted to be back in the vessel I liked, and to be somewhere a great distance away. I settled for crossing my arms over my chest. "What?"

"I would say 'It's none of my business' but in this case it is," he said, brisk and direct. Just like the way he swept the flashlight back out of my hand, and made it vanish into some pocket. "If it's Judgment, I can't do much about it if they show up with a warrant, but we're not in the habit of reporting the comings and goings of Outcasts who hold up their end of a deal. Stone, they're not likely to come by here. But you know that. So it's not either of them. Who are you so afraid of?"

"It's Discord," I said. "It just makes me...nervous."

"Like hell it is," Leo said, not unkindly. "But if you're nervous, stick around. I'm doing a door check."

The door check turned out to include every window in the building, plus close examination of the entrance to some crawlspace between floors I never would've guessed existed. I kept quiet on the off chance that he would forget the line of questioning. Ofanim were supposed to be flighty, weren't they? Distractible. Jumping at shadows.

I was the one flinching every time thunder rolled and lightning flashed. 

"Secure, then?" I asked, when we'd cycled all the way back around to his office again.

"Maybe."

"Maybe?"

"I could have swept through here and cleared out everything of interest in the building three times in the duration of that check," he said. "Mostly because there's not much of interest here to swipe, but the point remains. That said, no one clumsy has come inside, and the subtle types there's not much point in worrying about. Just dealing with when they come up."

"How do you deal with them when they come up?"

"Who should I expect?"

I didn't like the way he looked at me through those glasses. Which _had_ to be affectation, since any Discord that would affect eyesight wouldn't be fixed by glasses anyway. I sat down in a chair by the door and stared out the window. Most of the lights outside weren't back on yet. So it wasn't power being cut to the building. Probably. "I had a boyfriend," I said.

He sat on the edge of the desk, and waited. All the emergency lighting was in the hallway; I could barely see his face when he was that far from the open door.

"From the other side," I said, and wondered if everyone had been--no, he couldn't have lied about being an Ofanite, if he was really a Seraph. He would've called in the Malakim already if he'd spotted who I was. "These things _happen_ , okay? When you're Outcast. You have more in common with a Renegade than with anyone on your own side. It wasn't serious, exactly, but it was okay, and then he--didn't like that I was going to split off here without him, and it got bad. Probably it's nothing. But it makes me nervous, because someone could make it a real problem, maybe, if they were in good with their Word again. Even if I don't think they would for me."

"Are you more interested in working off dissonance or having some protection against enemies?" he asked, and it didn't even sound like an accusation.

"I just want--" There were so many true things I couldn't say there. To walk through the crowds of humanity and take what I wanted, and was that so bad? I would leave them happy enough, and I'd be happy, and everything could be great, if I didn't have to worry about Unathi catching up with me. Or to go back to where I'd been before, broke but safe enough, if only Unathi hadn't been coming after me. Everything that went wrong came back to my teacher. If it weren't trying to catch up with me, I could've been happy.

And the Ofanite on the desk waited, as if he weren't supposed to be some fidgety, distractible thing that couldn't string two thoughts together. The stereotypes had lied to me, and it wasn't fair. I was exactly what an Impudite was supposed to be. He wasn't holding up his end of the deal.

"I just want someone to notice if I go missing," I said, which was almost true.

"For how long?"

"I don't know," I said. "Not forever. Just--a while."

"I can do that much," he said.

"Is that a promise?"

I caught a glimpse of his smile in the flash of lightning, for the instant that it clarified everything and everyone in the room. Wry. "No," he said. "No promises yet. But I can try."


	12. In Which Sincerity And Good Intentions And Three Dollars Will Buy A Cup Of Coffee

There's a half hour argument with Nik about live trapping and ecological responsibility in an urban environment--which, yes, valid point, was built on top of a place where animals lived first, though I think that happened far enough in the past that we should all be able to get past it and move on to current events by now--before I get a chance to check in with Justin downstairs. He's doing the bleary-eyed keyboard poking that says he's been up all night on games again.

The org chart for the Tether is a mess right now. The Seneschal has delegated almost all management of personnel to me, but I'm not anyone's _boss_ , nor do I have much interest in harassing people about their personal lives. Unless he starts failing at work because of lack of sleep, Justin's bad time management is not my problem.

Besides, it strikes me as insensitive for someone who doesn't need sleep to bother him about his lack of it.

"Beautiful morning," I tell him.

He squints across the desk at me. "You're being sarcastic, aren't you."

"Only slightly. Did you ever get through to that Seraph?"

"Not once. What happened to your car?"

"Windies."

Justin's willing to give me a sympathetic wince for that one. "And here I thought you might just be parking it somewhere else, to make people wonder."

"I might get it back," I say, and circle around to his side of the desk slowly enough that he can change what's on his computer screen before I get there. "But I'm not counting on it. Nik's letting me borrow hers meanwhile. Show me the numbers you've been trying?"

Justin pulls up the card, and leans back while I flip through the rolodex--why we still keep phone numbers on physical slips of paper is beyond me, but I've been assured it's standard for a reason around here--to make sure we haven't lost, miswritten, or misplaced the number we're supposed to be calling.

"They're just not answering," he says. "It's not disconnected, it's not an answering machine. No answer. Why are you so interested in following up on this?"

"Because our resident Mercurian is lying through his teeth to me, and Penny's not stopping by for days yet." I leave the desk to meet Nik coming down the stairs. "How do you feel about an expensive trip across the country?"

She's just as good at giving me dubious looks from her human vessel as from any of her animal hosts. "Is this to get me out of the way while you trap squirrels?"

"Would I do something like that?"

"Yes," Nik and Justin say, not quite in unison.

"Point. But in this case, no, I'm checking up on Taylor's last known address."

"That's a long way to go about one Outcast," Justin says. "Not that it's any of _my_ business how you do angelic things, but he hasn't even stolen a pen."

"If he did, I would send him to Wind. They can work with that." The lobby is annoying me today. It's not shaped quite right for what it ought to be, and the door to the side is placed where it's bound to confuse tourists. Why don't people think about these things when they design a space? And I'm pacing out the edges of the room, which says I'm a little more worked up about what is--as even the human points out--not much of anything.

I can't even call it instinct. Instinct for an Ofanite is just _action_ , and action without direction is as much use as a Seraph standing in the middle of a room, spouting off whatever facts come to their mind.

"I'd say to call first," Nik says, "but you've called. No answer. It's worth checking."

"Well, if the paranoid Kyriotate agrees with you," Justin says, with an elaborate shrug, "who am I to argue? How long will you be gone?"

"I expect to be back before sunset. I'll Tether-hop there."

"Oh," Nik says, " _that_ kind of expensive."

#

Going back to Heaven is easy. And strange, because it shouldn't be easy to stop home for a cup of tea and a chat with friends. But it is when you work near a Tether. Easy, and pricy. Dropping a vessel costs a little, going up a Tether is, all else aside, wear and tear and sound that has to be accounted for. Just because I'm an employee who gets freebies doesn't mean it isn't noted somewhere.

I take a breath in the eternal sunlight, and remember belatedly that I don't have any lungs in my celestial form.

Still not used to being a burning wheel of fire. (Three, strictly speaking, with rings interlocking. Don't ask me to explain. It's just how things are.) I can draw the image of a vessel around me, but it's not exactly _here_. My shoes are half-real, rubber soles on a much more real marble floor beneath me. This Tether's locus sits as one of five on the northwest point of a dramatic mural: the others take up the southeast, southwest, northeast, and center, and all of them settle down on Trade Tethers particularly associated with trade by water. The room is nearly as much Nakhal's territory as the Kyriotate's own office is.

It's a little unreal, for a moment. All of it. Myself as fire and vessel-image at once, the room that belongs to an angel who belongs to Trade (different verbs, those two, in the angelic language, and neither means quite the same thing as _to own_ ), and the mural beneath my feet depicting water swirling around compass points.

Then Nik's three spare Forces coalesce next to me, and it's just...Heaven. I've been here before, more than once. She's a fraction of her usual self, but still has several eyes in her glitter-cloud to direct around the place.

"Hellooooo," says the reliever hovering overhead. "It's nice to see you. Did you catch the Windies that came down yesterday?"

"Depending on how you define 'catch'," I say, and get a blink for my trouble. The expression doesn't work well in this language. At times I long for English; it's imprecise in just the way I like. One of the many reasons I don't live in Heaven, however many benefits it has. "We met. I sent up the request about transit routes earlier?" I almost said _transit permits_ , but that's more of a concept for Hell than Heaven. This place likes to pretend that its borders are open, for the most part, even if individual Tethers are closed to all but the right people.

"Mm, yes." The reliever spins, silver particles drifting from its wings and vanishing before any of us can get sticky with glitter. Much like my fire, which won't set anyone in this place alight--whether I'd want it to or not--all sorts of celestial bodies here have aspects that are more notional than physical. Or simply as physical as doesn't cause inconvenience. People don't even bump into each other in crowds, in Heaven.

"Did you find a route?" Nik prompts, less patient than I am at the moment. She's edgy about leaving her vessel back at the office, and a little disjointed for being located in two realms at once. I expect it has about the same effect I'd get if I were suddenly running two bodies at once, the way Nik does as a matter of habit.

"Sort of," the reliever says, with full angelic precision. "Stone's closest on the corporeal. Dream's the next closest."

Nik says something rude, but in English, which leaves the reliever blinking mildly at us instead of horrified.

"Third time's a charm," I say. "Tell me it's not Wind. Just tell me it's not Wind."

"Fire!"

"...fourth. What's fourth closest."

"Leo," Nik says, "at this rate we might as well have driven."

"Going back and driving is also still an option."

Nik turns several eyes on me, while the reliever flutters gently overhead. It doesn't have any reason to rush. It's doing its job just by waiting here for us to decide.

"Fine," I say. "Fire, assuming it's still in the same city."

"Outskirts," the reliever says. "Good enough? Mm, good. Okaaaay, you need to go toward the Volcano, and take the left-hand path, and ask the relievers for Ugne, and then..." It waves its hands around in a glitter cloud. "There's a Tether? I asked about rates, but the reliever said that reducing interaction to mercantile transactions is an affront to the concept of sudden action within even something-something community structures, I don't remember the adjectives. They were fancy. So I guess you'll have to ask when you get there."

"God," I say, "Fire," and get moving.

"There's nothing wrong with Fire," Nik assures me, drifting just over my shoulder (or inside the spin of my second ring, depending on how you look at it) while I stalk my way towards the Volcano. "They don't have anything against us."

"I don't see why Heaven names everything after exactly what it is," I say, rather than explaining my problems with Fire, all of which would sound exceedingly petty, or like an admission of guilt, if I went over them explicitly. "Even in angelic, it's possible to give things interesting names. You don't have to go around calling yourself 'Sword Kyriotate Number Seventeen Thousand Forty-Six' when you can be Nikostratos. But it's always the Volcano and the Groves and the Glade, until you see that Lightning has named its giant halls of research the Halls of Progress and think, hey, there's a group of people with some real creativity going for them."

"Gabriel has a fortress," Nik points out.

"Called the Citadel of Fire. Thrill to the novelty!"

"You are in a _mood_ ," Nik says. "Is it because of the expense?"

"No, of course not." And even if it were, I would find a way to imply it wasn't. My financial debt, which is monumental and owed directly to the Sword, is entirely on Nik's behalf. She's prone to turning morose and apologetic about that if we dwell on it too long. "I just dislike politics."

"Fire has nothing against Trade. Or the Sword, even."

Certain people in Fire have a lot of somethings against me. But I didn't want to go into that. "It would be easier if we could just drop down that Stone Tether. But knowing Stone, they would stall until we should've flown anyway. We are, in theory, the good guys. We ought to be able to cooperate better."

"The way you do with the Windies?"

"See, that's a great example of small-minded personal affront getting in the way of the smooth functioning of inter-Word cooperation. Why do you let me get away with that, anyway?"

"It's not like you're throwing them out windows," Nik says evenly. I think she's enjoying the chance to be the calm one while I fuss over something; we usually do these conversations the other way around.

"I think the Seneschal would object to defenestration."

"Maybe. Do you think she'd mind, if they hit the water instead of the pavement?"

"Since none of my windows overlook the water that closely, I guess we'll never know."

Nik slouches over my shoulder (around the side of a spinning ring) amiably, and says, "You're fine. None of us are perfectly on our best behavior at all times."

"Except Olivia."

"She's young," Nik says, and that's enough of a joke, coming from her, that I grin over at her many-eyed cloud, and get a silver blush in return. "But if there were a single clear route to doing the work of Heaven, we would just...do it."

"Nothing in life is clear," I say, and check my phone. Penny's tagged as on the corporeal, so I can't even stop by to say hello. I settle for leaving him a series of mildly embarrassing texts. "Even for Seraphim."

"Nothing?"

"Translucent, maybe. But I don't think anything's transparent, if you look at it long enough and in a sufficiently wide context." We have drifted, or walked, or spun--means of transportation are always more flexible in Heaven than in Hell, where we'd probably be on a bus by this point--almost to the edge of the poorly yet accurately named Citadel of Fire. The walls and arches have been carved out of a dark stone that's basalt-glossy at the edges, as if the cutting was done by blowtorch. Or by the hand of an Archangel made of the primal concept of fire itself.

Fortunately, we're unlikely to meet her. I'm told that's even less fun than it used to be.

The left-hand path is steep and sharp-edged. I would be having Stygia flashbacks, if the sky weren't so bright and the air so calm. I can't fall from this path unless I care to, and I don't care to. (Heaven believes quite firmly that falling, like Falling, is always based on personal decisions in some way.) Nik settles across me, quiet enough that she's probably doing something fiddly with her vessel back on the corporeal. She _does_ have a job, even if she takes full advantage of not needing sleep to spend plenty of time with me in her free hours.

I'm scanning the doorways we pass for a convenient reliever to ask for directions when an Ofanite drops to the path in front of us like lightning from a clear sky. "You look practical," she says, and it almost sounds like an insult.

"Got it in one." My hands end up my pockets, and I'm wearing a toothy smile before I've really thought about the whole process. Old defensive gestures are hard to lose. "We're here to borrow a Tether, if it's not too much trouble."

"Which one?" The Ofanite executes a swirl that takes her blue fire, a single complex loop so tangled into itself I ought not be able to tell it is a single line, from directly in front of us to rolling along the cliff's edge at my side. "Trouble is relative."

"I was supposed to ask for Ugne."

"Do you mean to?"

"God, no one warned me Fire was full of pedants."

"Well," says the Ofanite, "I'm on loan from Lightning."

"Then I suppose I should expect it." I indicate my shoulder Kyriotate with a quick wave. "This is Nikostratos, I'm Leo, and we'd like to book passage down to the corporeal. And back, if that's possible. I have a Tether to watch over and business at a distance, so I'm Tether-hopping."

"And you're from?"

"Trade."

"Then it'll probably cost you something," says the Ofanite.

"I think that's fair."

"You would." It's not _quite_ an accusation, how she says it. She turns through a doorway, and I walk alongside her there. The floor is rough and the walls are slick, stone melted into gloss and shimmer that never quite resolves into reflection. It's not what I've come to expect from Heaven. Maybe I should be relieved that it's not all modern architecture and Mercurians in excellent suits.

But I _like_ modern architecture. Especially now that people have gotten past that green glass fad on skyscrapers. (Once in a while, sure, but any visual theme gets monotonous after a point.) In Heaven, it's never clear if archaic design is deliberate anachronism or simply the stability of a place that doesn't have any Superiors knifing each other in the back every few centuries.

Apparently none of the Archangels have ever knifed each other, aside from during the Fall. The first one, with the big capital letters, where a place that had never know more than irritable politics suddenly broke into violence. I can't imagine what that was like. I've never lived in a place where people weren't inclined to knife each other at the slightest pretext--and, often lacking knives, teeth and claws got us to about the same place--until I moved here. Murder as a constant assumed danger still feels more natural than any of this.

There's a portion of the walk where we leave the paths inside the walls to walk into the center of Gabriel's Volcano itself, lava to each side of the paths and Ofanim cavorting through it. The heat is like the breath of a God I still only half believe in.

Let's move on.

The Tether we want is tucked away in a niche where all the light bounces off glossy walls from lamps dangling from the ceiling. Even with the image of my vessel pulled up against me, I cast reflections on the walls myself, with a silvery shimmer for Nik's few Forces with me.

"Ugne minds this side of the Tether," says the Ofanite, and leaves us there with no further introduction.

Ugne is not immediately apparent. Not until I catch sight of a flicker, black on black, at the top of the stone arch defining the Tether itself. I blink twice, deliberate and refocusing, and see the Cherub spread out across that arch. A panther, wings as black as hide, watches us with half-lidded dark eyes.

I tuck my hands behind my back, and watch the Cherub in silence. It's easy. Like being in the office of a superior officer who hasn't given me any stupid orders yet. And Nik follows my lead. There are plenty of reasons I work with her, why I asked for her as a bodyguard over all other possible options or suggestions, and that's high on the list. She can follow a cue.

She's as direct as the thrust of a knife, but dull she is not.

And I wait there, perfectly steady, for what I count out as three full minutes.

"Usually," the Cherub says, in a rough, amused voice, "a Wheel would be asking questions by now."

"Is there a particular question you thought I ought to be asking?"

Nik turns a reproachful look on me, but only on the inner side of that ring. (Where I wouldn't be able to see, by the vision of vessel eyes, but Ofanim don't quite see that way, in Heaven.) She doesn't think I ought to get into these sorts of conversations with people I need favors from. She's probably right.

I would not be me if I made consistently good decisions.

"I suppose that depends on whether you wanted a trip to the corporeal," Ugne says, "or a chat. I _do_ love a good chat."

"Well, this is inspiring," I say. "Does that mean I can use your Tether?"

"That probably works better in a language that doesn't have mandatory marking for sarcasm," Ugne says.

"Not really. It's equally obvious there."

Her tail's tip flicks across the arch. "Learn something new every day. Why _do_ you want to use our Tether, Trader? We like to play it quiet. Subtle. Not as much setting things on fire as you might expect."

I honestly cannot tell if that's a general statement about Word stereotypes, or if my reputation precedes me. Probably the former. The latter might require meeting with various people I've so far avoided encountering more closely than via the Heavenly postal service.

It's not exactly a postal service, actually. You give a reliever, let's say by way of example, a nice card apologizing for something you did to a person while you were still a demon, and the reliever delivers it to the right person while you find a good place to be unfindable for a few days. People with more to send around get someone to run the post full-time. A great deal of Heaven exists in that weird space of having less bureaucracy and process than should be necessary simply because you can trust almost everyone to behave almost completely selflessly almost all of the time.

The qualifiers in that statement are important, too, for figuring out how the hell Heaven functions.

"I'm following a lead on a potential security threat to the Tether I work at," I say, which is technically true on every point and not very illuminating. It would be equally accurate to say _I have a weird feeling about this Outcast we're watching over, and I can't tell if it's paranoia or empathy or actual threat._ "And I'm in a hurry, because we're a little understaffed right now."

The Cherub's ear twitches. The longer I watch her in this flickering light, the better I can make her out. "Why are you understaffed?"

"Traumatized Mercurian." Which I know just enough of the details on to know it's none of my business. "You know how it goes. So many things to do, so few personnel able to cope with the difficulties of the corporeal plane."

"Not everyone is cut out to live in a war zone," says the Cherub. "Some of them burn their fingers. Have you?"

I wiggle a hand at her. "Who hasn't?"

"You don't believe in Purity, then?"

It's an interesting phrasing in this language. (Angelic is not and never will be transparent, to me. It means things too precisely for me to forget the format and focus on the content.) To believe in isn't to believe that something exists, but to believe in its essence being significant in a manner. The question is almost difficult to form: how could I not believe in the significance of a Word that was once held by an Archangel?

"I don't think it worked out very well in practice," I say.

The Cherub rumbles deep in her chest. It's more a chuckle than a growl. "For all have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God."

"Not my religion, but the sentiment's appropriate."

"There's falling short, and then there's falling," Ugne says. "Have you comforted the orphan and widow? Fed the hungry, visited the imprisoned?"

"One out of three isn't bad, right?" I flash a brighter smile. "No, wait. Two out of three. But I should get bonus points for breaking the imprisoned out."

A wing extends my way. "Bonus points allotted. I'm inclined to let you through, but tell me, for the sake of doing my work as I ought, have you betrayed those devoted to you?"

Nik is very quiet and still, at my shoulder.

"Yes," I say. "More than once." In other circumstances, I would smile more sharply than before. Not here.

Ugne's the one who holds her silence, this time, until I keep talking.

"I think it's inevitable," I say. "It's the same problem as Purity, as long as you've brought that up. Some concepts only work if they're removed from the complexity of what isn't Heaven. Maybe it's possible, if you live in Heaven and only associate with people in your own faction of your own Word and don't commit too far and everyone does exactly what they're told, to keep your loyalties simple and pure. Or maybe it's possible if you only ever love one person, or you're only loved by that one person, so everything comes down to what's best for them. But even then, it's all judgment calls, as soon as it's anything more important than coffee delivery. What they want and what you think they ought to want and where life ends up going anyway. You can't go to the corporeal and meet people and care about them, or be cared for by them, and not go wrong. By mistake or by personal failure, or just by people wanting different things. Because we do. Heaven isn't a single giant Kyriotate, and it never was, and so failure of loyalty is inevitable, and...whether that's betrayal or not depends on who you're asking."

I shove my hands in my pockets, and study one of the lamps for a moment. Its fire is probably eternal. How convenient, really. To be able to have eternal fire without destroying anything that might not wish to be destroyed.

"But that's veering into avoiding the question," I say. "I was a demon once, and if I had stayed loyal to the people who counted on me, I wouldn't be here. It must be harder for Djinn to leave Hell than anyone else. How do you make a Cherub by starting from betrayal?"

"I don't know," Ugne says, tail lashing across the top of the arch. "Though I'm learning something about what sorts of questions to ask people who want a trip downstairs."

"Learn something new every day."

"Mm. Yes." She bats at the archway with a paw. "Go ahead. Be nice to the Seneschal; it's had a terrible week."

#

The longest part of the trip is getting from the Fire Tether to the bar. It would be a fifteen minute process if I just stole a car, and that would be after taking some time to consider my vehicle options. But I'm being good--for some kind of good that means paying for things the society I'm in expects payment for, emergencies aside--and since the Fire Tether isn't conveniently located by a major airport, that means no stolen cars, no cabs at hand, and no way to grab a rental.

Nik makes a disgusted noise when I step off the bus. "Tell me about it," I say, "but that _was_ the best route." For once, my resonance hooked into the Symphony well enough to lay out the options. It's nothing like GPS. Not a visual, not a series of instructions, but a sort of ghost map hovering at the edge of consciousness. If you've ever zoned out for ten minutes on a commute and delivered yourself safely home out of sheer habit, it's that level of _knowing_ where I mean to go.

The bar itself is a sort of gap in this kind of knowing. It's the building people don't look at when they pass, and wouldn't remember if it were replaced by another overnight. The only reason I can find it is that we had the address tucked away in the Tether, on one of those cards that never gets transcribed online. I suppose it's safer from the types of security leaks I'm not adept at stopping--computer crime is not my specialty--but one small fire could destroy that info. I could copy the cards out, but that would be one more place other people could access the information.

Security from destruction and security from theft are more often in tension than you'd think.

A concept that springs readily to mind, when I look at the broken door to this bar. It's been propped back in place, but I know a door that's been removed from its hinges by violent force when I see one. The windows are all shaded and dark to start with, but one's been cracked from the inside, and recently.

"Well," I say, and Nik scrambles to the top of my jacket pocket to take a look for herself. "No wonder they weren't answering the phone."

She scrambles out and down my leg. It's early afternoon, and there aren't enough pedestrians out to notice the rat before it reaches the door. One of the grackles perched along the power lines overhead swoops down to sit on my shoulder. That, someone might notice, but I'm not here to be wildly subtle. I'm here for a few answers.

"Anyone inside?" I ask Nik in the grackle, strolling a few paces closer. Her head bobs. "How friendly do they look?" That gets a dubious resettling of her wings. "I suppose that'll make it more fun. Is the bartender there?" Another bob. "Tell her I'm coming in. I'd rather not get shot because I'm _not_ sneaking around."

I wait until Nik's settled down again, and maneuver the broken door open. It...sort of swings. They need to get people who know construction in if they want to be able to lock it again, though.

The space inside hasn't been sharp or stylish in at least forty years, but I would guess that it usually contains more furniture that hasn't been broken. The angular woman behind the bar has a broom, and the clink of broken glass accompanying her sweeping. She shoots a glance my way, and says nothing. That's probably a good habit for an Outcast Seraph to cultivate, when she's spent a few decades being on the outs with Heaven and steadfastly refusing to join up with Hell.

"We're closed," says a man skulking in a booth. He has a drink in a cracked mug, and a long cut down the side of his face. He is also taking some effort to stick to the shadowy parts of that booth, in what's already a dimly lit bar. I couldn't pick him out of a police lineup an hour from now.

"And you don't know me," I say. Hands out of my pockets, where people can see them. There's a pair of customers down at the end of the bar, where they were contemplating a broken stool until I walked in. The smaller of them holds what...is not a welding torch, because I know what a welding torch looks like, and that is not it. That is something far less natural and far more technological, which is impressive when the nature level it was leaping above was "welding torch". It's downright Technological, even.

I am slightly less unwelcome here than I would be in an actual Tether of Hell. And safer, because none of these people want Heaven showing up to ask questions about the disappearance of one or two angels in good standing (for certain values of 'good').

Nik has a death-grip on my shoulder with her grackle host. Maybe I should remember that Renegades and Outcasts often get there through poor long-term planning, when it comes to assessing my own safety.

"We don't," says the larger figure behind the little Vapulan. Djinn or Cherub, if I'm going by vessel and movement style alone, with Djinn a little more likely by her company and the slow, steady placement of her palm on the bar. "So who _are_ you?"

"We don't need to be unfriendly," says the Vapulan, which gets a disgusted snort from Mr. Lurky in the booth. "Well, we don't! This time around no one has asked awkward questions or started getting violent and I'm much better armed, so I think we're already doing really well and maybe we could just keep that up."

"My name's Leo." I am being careful not to make any sudden movements, because god only knows what a _Renegade_ Vapulan considers sufficient weaponry to cover a chat with suspicious intruders. "Ofanite of Trade. I hate to bother you when you're all busy, but something came up."

"Not our problem," says the Djinn.

"Your Archangel wouldn't want you here," says Mr. Lurky. "Might get contaminated." He sneers like he discovered the expression late in life. More likely an angel than not, which doesn't make much difference in threat level here.

"Or thrown through a table," says the Djinn.

"No, no, that was _yesterday_." The Vapulan is far too chirpy for a place like this. I'm guessing Habbalite or Balseraph; none of the other Bands can do self-deception to the same levels as those two. "We're all being very peaceful here!" She waves the thing that isn't a soldering iron my way. "Look at how constructive we're being!"

If I were a Renegade Calabite, this would be the point where I'd offer some useful advice for actual effective construction, and things would go--somewhere. This is the kind of place I could've skulked about for years, if I'd been given a chance, back when Nik and I were the sort of people this bar serves.

But I'm here on company time, not for beers and dubious friendship. "I wanted to ask about Taylor," I say, and cancel some apologetic explanation because the soldering iron is now pointed directly at me. Everyone was looking at me before, but oh, postures have shifted, even if expressions haven't.

I raise my hands up. Nik is very still on my shoulder.

"The others weren't Trade," says the bartender.

"And they were asking about Taylor," I say. "Weren't they?"

The Vapulan lowers her weapon, but only far enough that it's pointing at my knees instead of my chest. Would not like to get shot there, either, with whatever that thing emits. "What a lucky guess," she says. Her smile's very bright.

"Educated guess. He showed up twitchy--"

"That would be the Discord," drawls the man in the booth. "Happens to the best of us."

"--and he's running from _someone_ , but won't tell me who. I called here for a hint, no one answered for a day straight, I got a little twitchy myself."

"Don't see why you should care," says the Djinn, "if someone chews through our spaces. Or any of us." She has, without making any rapid motions, transitioned from standing at the far side of the bar to looming over the Vapulan's shoulders. Attuned? Almost certainly.

I would care. Not personally and deeply; it's just a thing I would rather not happen. Renegades and Outcasts who aren't trying to set the world on literal fire should have some amenable boltholes, where they can get a little socialization in with other people who feel the same way, and not get panicked into doing something stupidly destructive.

Not that I would know anything about panicked destruction when out of places to run.

"I care about someone who can take on a room full of celestials and walk away afterward showing up to harass a person who's officially taking refuge in my Tether."

"If the twins had been here--" begins the Djinn.

"But they weren't," snaps Mr. Lurky. "You think one person did this?"

I spread my hands, silent. Not quite putting them down yet, and definitely not making any sudden movements.

"There were three," says the Vapulan. "Big one and a little one and a medium size one, and when they walked in Corey made a joke about the three bears. Did you ever read that story?"

The lurker stands up, and pitches his glass onto the floor. It shatters at my feet, beer over my shoes and glass spreading across painted cement that someone, maybe him, finished cleaning not long ago.

"It's none of his business," he says tightly, "and he should leave, and take his damn Kyrio with him. They're spying on us."

I smile with my teeth clamped together rather than say a few pertinent things about that bit of paranoia. And maybe it's actual Discord. Anyone with a cracked or shattered Heart picks up some personal issues, physical or mental or really bizarrely metaphysical. Can't be helped.

"Gonna run out of glasses," says the Djinn.

"I don't want to get up in your business," I say, and wish the Seraph would vouch for me. Here I am being so damn careful to tell the truth, and most of the people here can't tell. "Not any of you. But so long as Taylor's working off dissonance in a Tether I'm responsible for, I need to know if anyone dangerous is hunting him. And it sounds like yes."

"You could just throw him out," says the Djinn. Her hands rest on the Vapulan's shoulders. "Easy as that. And when three people show up to ask after him, you point them his way."

"Don't be ridiculous," I say. "I told him he could stay."

The Djinn smiles at me, showing teeth. "Did you promise?"

"No," I say. I shove my hands back in my pockets, because no one here is afraid of me, exactly. Just of what I might represent. "But I do have a professional reputation to uphold. Will you tell me what happened?"

The Djinn exchanges a long, thoughtful look with the Vapulan. When they both turn back to me, I'm sure who's in charge between the two of them, and it's not the big one. 

"What would you give us for that?" asks the Vapulan. The lurker, as we are all pointedly ignoring him, sits back down at the booth, muttering. "Since you're Trade, and all. Trade me something."

"How do you feel about cash?"

"Oh," says the Vapulan, "I _like_ cash."

#

The assembled sequence of the story is this:

Three women walk into a bar. It's not the start of a joke. They ask after two people, by description rather than name: Taylor and his girlfriend. The locals, being at that moment this same set of people plus one--Corey, Word and nature unspecified--are about as helpful to these three people as they were to me. The Djinn and Vapulan are a little drunk, the lurker is ready to pick a fight, the twins--some other locals, apparently the muscle around here, nature very unspecified--are absent. The bartender has no comment. The bartender never has a comment. She doesn't like talking to celestials.

Which is a funny trait for someone who decided to run a gathering place for Outcasts and Renegades, to the point you might begin to wonder just how Outcast she is herself, or you would if she weren't a Seraph and thus fundamentally unable to lie on this point. But sometimes, especially with Creation, you wonder.

That's my digression. Not theirs.

The lurker decides to make a fuss at the visitors. One of them throws him through a table. At this point, accounts become confused: there are a few Songs involved, various uses of resonance on both sides, the firing of some Vapulan device that doesn't perform as desired, and the Seraph attempting to convey through hand gestures alone, while keeping out of the way, that everyone needs to keep the disturbance down. No one can specify which Songs are used. They are clear on the point that one of the three (though not which) has an artifact knife.

The visitors exit the bar, having caused significant property damage. It is discovered, somewhat in the aftermath, that they took Corey with them.

This is the point at where people stop wanting to explain things to me anymore.

#

"What happened to him?"

The Djinn shrugs, slouching her way back to the bar. "Not my problem. Never liked him anyway."

"He was always very whiny," says the Vapulan, spinning back and forth atop the surviving barstool she's propped up. It wobbles with every spin. "I always thought Taylor should have been dating him, because they would've complemented each other. Complain, whine, bitch, moan, snuffle, never my fault! Of course, they hated each other. Not many people like people who are like the people they are."

"I didn't ask if you liked him." I am getting fidgety. I hate it when I get fidgety, it makes me feel so much like one of those Wheels with no damn control. Nik accepts an offered hand, and I swap her to my other shoulder, just for something to do. "I asked what happened to him."

No one in the bar will look directly at me.

"You just let them _take_ him?"

"What do you expect us to do?" snaps the lurker, who is back in his booth, now without anything to drink. Which shows just how useful petty gestures of violence actually are. Let that be a lesson to us all. "Rescue him? We're not Wordmates. We're not friends. We're not even part of the glorious war you people are killing yourselves over, anymore."

"First thing a Renegade has to do," says the Vapulan, "is look out for herself. Outcasts, too. He wouldn't come after us. If you were an Outcast, you wouldn't go looking to help people you never liked either."

She's wrong.

Maybe she's right. I would've run to help Nik, or Ferro, but I _liked_ them. Maybe I would've been just this selfish, demon or angel, in a circumstance like this.

I want to think I would've tried anyway.

"What about Taylor's girlfriend? Have you seen her since this all happened?" Because there has to be one person in this place who knows about that kid's personal enemies, or at least some hint about them.

"Not since he left for the Tether," says the Vapulan. "I thought she tagged along. Who wouldn't want to tag along? It's fun for everyone! And she liked having someone to stand behind, when excitement happened."

"Didn't even like him," says the Djinn.

"No," says the Vapulan cheerfully, "but she faked it well. A class act. She's probably waiting in your city for him to finish up so they can meet again. She's exactly the kind to go right up to where she's not supposed to be, and talk him into taking her along."

"What's she like?" Because a lover sneaking around the edges of the Tether would explain a lot of Taylor's lies, but...not exactly. That's not protection that has him on edge. He's afraid of something. "Dangerous?"

The Djinn snorts.

The Vapulan looks back at her friend, then shrugs to me. "Not the kind of dangerous that kicks down the door. Maybe the kind that stabs you in the back. Pretty little Impudite, sweet and friendly, and cagey as anyone else here."

I weigh the information I have so far. Not damn near enough. "Do you think those three were after Taylor, or after _her_?" Afraid for someone else isn't it either, with the way he's been lying to me, but it seems closer. And I may just not be reading him right. Penny can't stop by to visit soon enough; I feel guilty about using his personal visit to sic him on a work project, but I want real Seraphic _truth_ about this mess.

"I could charge you more and give you an opinion," says the Vapulan, "but it'd be a bad use of your money, because I don't know. Could be either! Or the set!"

I put a business card on the bar. Not the ones my Role uses, but the much simpler ones that have nothing but a phone number and an icon. "If she or Corey shows up, they can give me a call. Cash for answers."

"I wouldn't expect a call," the Vapulan says.

I don't. But I'm hedging my bets, and going home.


	13. Interlude: General Tso's Chicken, Brown Rice, Shrimp Spring Roll

Quinta crawled back into the van inside a new host before Secundum had finished the last of the cleanup. She set the boxes of take-out in an untidy stack on top of the chest freezer, and accepted a knife from the Djinn to help with jointing and packing the corpse. When she had to move the boxes again, so that Secundum pack the last of the meat into the freezer, that was reminder enough about planning ahead. The movement was awkward inside the van, with limited space and her own hands bloody from the work.

Unathi said nothing, once it was sure she had noticed her own error. Harping on obvious mistakes was no way to educate the young. And demons, who never had the thoughtful reserve of Habbalah, were more likely to lie and turn stubborn when embarrassed than to admit their failures.

Not every learning experience was a grand event. At times they were quiet moments with three people who knew each other reasonably well working together, Unathi passing around the boxes once its students had washed their hands, Quinta remembering to put away her borrowed knife before picking up a fork.

Secundum set to eating as if its vessel needed the food. Vessels didn't, which was what made meals on the corporeal a different kind of pleasure than those at home. All consumption in Hell indicated luxury or ambition: a vessel-wearing celestial on the corporeal plane consumed what others might have needed, redistributing what was available towards those who were powerful enough to step into a part of reality not their own and take what they liked. All luxury, all excess, all a declaration of ownership. One of Unathi's teachers had called that process the colonization of stomachs, and it still liked to think about this at times.

It did not think about that teacher much, beyond those words. He had been inadequate, and proven so quickly enough. But he _had_ had a knack for metaphor.

"Do you think she's actually at the Tether?" Quinta asked, between short, sharp bites. She was swallowing almost without chewing. Her host, which complicated the metaphor somewhat, would be served well enough.

"Why else kill the Mercurian?" Secundum asked. It wiped its mouth with the back of a sleeve that had picked up bloodstains. The whole shirt would need discarding; the van couldn't manage laundry on top of its other duties.

"Because she's--" Quinta snorted. "I still think she's mad. It's a mad plan. Maybe she thought the Mercurian was going to rat her out to the angels, along with all the other runaways, and stabbed him for that. She could be anywhere by now."

"It's a lead," Secundum said.

"We could go back to the bar and pick up someone else," Quinta said. "Get better answers. Different answers. I'd like some answers that don't send us towards a Heavenly Tether." She had the least reason to ask for another hostage for practical reasons; a Shedite could simply change to a less damaged host, while most of the final knifework on their captive had gone to restoring Secundum's vessel to health.

Unathi considered whether she made the suggestion out of fear of the destination, love of destruction, or sincerely reached conclusion from the facts at hand. A Shedite had more reason to fear hostile Tethers than most demons, with the amount of time they spent in their true forms, and also tended towards more eagerness for petty breakage. But she was no coward, unlike some students it had taken, nor lacking in subtlety.

Both of its students fell silent to wait for its ruling. They wouldn't argue long on a project such as this; they had picked up on the urgency not only from what Unathi had told them, but from the way it had managed most of the interrogation personally, and--truth be told--roughly. There had been no time for subtlety or long-term plans in that.

"We'll follow this lead," Unathi said, and paid attention to its students' internal reactions, which did not always match their obedient nods. The Shedite was worried, but relieved: her teacher had made its decision, and she no longer had responsibility for consequences. The Djinn was unhappy, determined, less worried that an older demon might be about their next target.

Unathi did not see any reason to fear what was ahead. It had plenty of resources for what lay ahead, and better yet, time yet for subtlety there. A knife early on could save space for softer words later.


	14. In Which I Get Better Answers

It's some time past one in the morning and the moon's setting when I get back home. Home in the sense of the Tether locus, with a silent human captain there to provide a boat and keep me from getting my feet wet on the descent. You have to wonder once in a while about humans who sign on to serve the cause of God directly, and end up doing support staff work for a bunch of angels who run off and get all the excitement. Or maybe all the humans who want to serve God in an _exciting_ way get pointed at War and the Wind.

If I try to parse the difference between "serving God" and "serving Heaven" I'm going to end up trying to explain it to this man, and I know better by now. There are Soldiers of God to have philosophical discussions with, and there are Soldiers of God to treat as politely and fairly as possible while letting them focus on what people better at human management than I am told them to do. This would be the latter. As is his sister, I suppose. I don't know either of them well.

That might be a failing in me. Or in our organizational structure around here. Or not a failing at all, just the natural course of events as they've been optimized for long-term gain based on limited knowledge and resources.

"Can't head in yet," he finally says, while I lean on the rail and watch the ripples of the water. "That Mercurian's due up in ten. Unless you're in a hurry?"

"Nope. No real hurry." I flatten my fingers across the railing where old habits would convince me to pick idly at the surface. "Role maintenance doesn't care if I'm faking sleep habits at 2am or 3am."

He ducks his head, and goes back to doing something with rope. Vital ship things, probably. Never did get the hang of water-based transportation methods. I suppose that's ironic these days, given I'm reporting to the Angel of Waterways more often than to the Seneschal here or my Archangel directly, but it made a lot of sense back when I was serving Fire. Who wants to be on a boat that's on fire? Not even us, back then. It's a bad situation all around.

An owl settles on the rail, and cocks its head up at me.

"If you're really concerned," I tell Nik, "you can pick up a fish and go see, but I honestly don't think it's that big of a deal."

Her feathers puff up, and she side-steps along the railing nearer to my hands. I give her a lift up to my shoulder, where she nestles in against my neck. Her host is a ridiculous little fluffy thing, and fits beneath my chin. Not so great a position for reading what she's trying to convey with animal body language, but it's a companionable sort of place for her to hang out. God knows Nik could use a friend.

I don't ask how her Role is managing, very often. I get the impression that she's being more careful this time around. That doesn't make for a lot of close friendships with humans. I'm not sure that "careful" is ever a good strategy for making friends of any type. It's not a strategy that's worked well for me in the past.

One might say my entire past is a cautionary tale of some sort, though, so I don't know how far I should extrapolate.

The captain sets a winch going. Something automated, so I keep my hands to myself, and watch the line move through the water. A metropolitan skyline ought to reflect on a river; this one doesn't, much. A small Tether in a small city, that used to be an important port when a great many things were different. Before my time. The Seneschal doesn't like talking about it.

That's another thing you don't get in Hell, I guess. That sense of loss. People in Hell lose and die, or lose and move on, but it's not safe to linger. Heaven's ranks are full of the damaged fringes who aren't rendered down for parts and refuse to let go of what they've lost. The Seneschal's still a perfectly good Kyriotate for her job, if she has supporting staff, so why not leave her in place? And Heaven's just...fine on resources. There's room for everyone. Even the people who aren't functional, temporarily or otherwise, like the Mercurian who was pulled out of here right before I showed up.

Hell could do the same. In the sense that it has the space and...damaged celestials, assuming they're not trying to damage anything else, are perfectly inert. Maintenance-free. You could just leave them. But demons who break and don't break upward aren't useful, and parts are useful, and...well.

Things I still don't like thinking about: it's a long list.

Taylor grabs at the railing as soon as his head breaks the surface. Misses. I lean over and grab his hand, and haul him on board while the rest of what's on the cable follows the automated progression.

"Thanks," he says, as if he's just remembered that people say that kind of thing to each other. He doesn't look grateful so much as worn out. "Would you help me get this off?"

Taylor sits down on the deck as soon as I've peeled the artifact pack off him. He looks over his hands, and then up at me with a wry smile that's...charming. I've seen that off someone before, almost the same move, though I can't place it immediately.

"Sorry," he says. "It's been a long night. Good thing we don't need sleep, right?" He puts out a hand, and takes mine again for help standing up. "I'll have to throw myself on the mercy of the Goodwill box again."

"That's what it's there for." I drop my shoulder to let Nik trundle her way to its end more comfortably; she launches into the sky, vanished in an instant. Owls are made to be hard to see in the night. It's as natural to them as...I don't know, Malakim and jumping to conclusions about who needs to die. You would think that would be the trait of Choir Zippy, but no.

And maybe that's why I'm running myself in circles about how to talk to Taylor about the mess he's found himself in. There are some nasty potential conclusions I could draw, and I'd rather not. It's still a novelty to be able to assume good intent among the people I interact with on a regular basis; I'd like to run with that as long as I can.

It's definitely a trait among Ofanim to keep running further than they ought.

"I'd invite you back to my place for breakfast," I say, "except it's probably too far from the Tether to work out well. I've always been fuzzy on the metaphysics of working off dissonance anyway."

"I appreciate the thought," Taylor says. I don't need those glasses Penny sent me to tell he's stepping around a topic, but I might be a little more clear on what it was if I'd thought to put them on. But this Mercurian looks remarkably sincere when he says these things directly to my face. He's not quite lying, either. Just...avoiding something.

Renegades have a lot to avoid. Outcasts must too, I suppose. It's a weird situation that I don't have a precise analogy for; you'd be paying in something dearer than blood and Essence to get a chance to work through dissonance at an infernal Tether if you were Renegade. We're giving him the chance for free. But the two situations aren't exactly analogous. Hell doesn't believe in kicking people out for bad behavior.

For a place that's nominally all about rebellion against authority, Hell is not real big on giving people second chances.

I lean on the railing while the captain takes the boat back to the dock. Taylor's as quiet as anything, his eyes on the skyline. About where the moon just set, I'd say. A Discord's the kind of thing that stays in the back of your mind.

And he's not particularly twitchy when he's not thinking about other people watching him. That could be the flavor of the Discord he has, or...it could be something else.

I walk him back to the office. It's late at night, after all, though the docks aren't exactly a high-crime area at two in the morning. No one lives close enough to be loitering. Most of the homeless population in the city holes up in other places, and they're more likely to attract predators than be ones, anyway. Still. It's a decent excuse to walk alongside Taylor for a few minutes, and see how he moves.

He's not bad in this vessel. But it's not the one he'd like to be in.

"So," I say, once we're in the lobby, door locked behind us again, "I stopped by that bar you were hanging around before. The one with the Outcast Seraph tending the bar, you know?"

Taylor's pace goes uneven. He's in much better control of his face than his movement, as body language goes. "Really? How's everyone doing?"

"A more suspicious man might ask why." I sit down on the reception desk, and Taylor comes to a halt in front of me. "So, in order: yes, really. Not particularly well at the moment. Why? Because I was calling to double-check, and no one was picking up on the other end."

"Wow," Taylor says. "What happened?"

"What happened," I say, "is that people showed up looking for a particular couple, a Renegade Impudite and an Outcast Mercurian, and didn't like that the folks there weren't fond of giving out straight answers. Maybe they should've tried cash, instead of throwing people across the room. I got much better answers that way when I started asking, and they don't like _me_ in that place, either. The people chasing after your trail also seem to have abducted one of the locals. Someone who I'm informed no one liked, so maybe you're not too concerned on that point, but it's the kind of thing I pay attention to." I spread my hands out. No weapons. Not even a resonance that acts like one, anymore. "Do you want to explain? Or should I start making educated guesses, and see which ones pan out?"

He folds his arms across his chest. That's half defensive gesture, and half covering up a reach toward something I'm not supposed to notice him thinking of grabbing. I did not think he had any weapons on him, but it's amazing what they can do with artifacts these days. Either that, or it's where he used to carry one, with the move composed of reflex instead of current threat. Better to count on current threat and be proven wrong. "What's your first guess?"

"That you've never worked for Theft or the Wind," I say, "or you'd have a better idea of where your exits are. That door is locked, and if you ran for it now, this would get embarrassing."

He's very quiet. If he had a good answer, he would've given it already.

"It's actually something of a fire code violation," I say. "It should open outward automatically even when it's locked. But the whole building was grandfathered in on account of being historic, which I have mixed feelings on in general. What are you actually doing here?"

"Hiding," he says. "I...mentioned. That there was trouble." It's not exactly that I meant to scare him, but he's the kind of terrified that turns into biting as easily as fleeing, and there are times when that gets you more honesty than trying to ask about things softly and gently with lots of clear exits. I don't buy that he has the Discord he claimed. He's not paranoid or twitchy, he's afraid of things he ought to be afraid of.

"You mentioned a lot of things in that way that's designed to get around a Seraph reading the transcript afterward," I say, "which believe me, I've done before myself, so I wasn't going to call you on it at the time. But it looks like the threat level has inched up a bit, and I have a Tether to protect. So tell me more about yourself, and exactly what kind of trouble you're talking about."

"I could just leave," he says. Trying to figure out his options. He hasn't decided yet, fight or flee or plead guilty, and if he goes for the first things will become very interesting. The second is almost the easiest. I'll just have Nik follow along and see what happens.

Easiest isn't always the best choice.

"Whoever is following you stopped to shake up a bar full of celestials to get a line on you. You have a better idea than I do about the number of people who spend time there. Do you think someone like that will hesitate to smash through a Tether for some quick answers? Because I used to hit Tethers with nothing but a Djinn at my back and a few clever ideas, so I'm thinking it's _not likely_ that this is where they'll choose to back off. Not even if you've already moved on."

"I didn't..." His hands twitch. "I'm just trying to get _away_."

"And I might yet help." I flip a pen from the desk around between my fingers, and point it at him. "If you tell me the truth. I thought of waiting on this conversation until I had a Seraph at my elbow, but aside from the untrusting impression that gives, I didn't want to wait that long. Because I don't know when these people are arriving. Or who they are. What I do know is you've been lying to me. I don't like making tactical plans on bad information. Sometimes people die, and I get annoyed when I'm on the list."

He bites the corner of his lip. Wrong motion for this vessel. Wrong motion for _Stone_ , that I've ever seen, and I should've picked up on this sooner, but since when do I expect other people to make the kinds of crazy plans I do?

There's that little shift of posture, and I sigh. Out loud, maybe more than I meant to. And he freezes up.

"Just think," he says, with a hesitant smile, "I came here because I didn't want to die. If I run, would you really--"

"I don't like dealing in hypotheticals." I set the pen down. "Especially when it starts sounding like making promises. Do you mean to answer any of my questions, or just stall until you come up with a better escape plan?"

His jaw tightens. Poor kid. I've been in situations like this, and I wouldn't much like the person sitting where I am now, either.

"I'm not the Mercurian of Stone you were expecting," he says. "No."

"Impudite. The one they said was his girlfriend." I remember his smile on the deck of the boat, and exactly where I'd seen that move before. Lanthano could pull that expression off even better, though maybe some of the better was that I was more amenable to being charmed at the time. "You're pretty fucking scared to try to hide out here."

"It was working," he says, "wasn't it?"

"Oh, it was. I am impressed." I drop off the desk, and walk past him, pretending I don't notice the flinch. "Come on. There's no need to have this conversation here. Unless you really do have dissonance you care about working off?"

"Not really," he says, pivoting to watch me. "Then we're going somewhere with beer," I say, "which is not the office. Company policy." I unlock the door, and push it open. "Unless you're still thinking of bolting into the night."

"You have a Kyriotate."

"Smart kid. Come on."


	15. Taylor & Approximate Truths

Everyone has heard about Trade, like Freedom, living the high life, but Leo turned out to have a very middle class sort of apartment, if one with a pricy river view. I sat down in the middle of his couch--something from Ikea--and stared at the cat on top of the bookcase. The cat glared back at me. It was a ratty little orange and black thing that stared at me as if I was exactly what I was: an Impudite trying to pull one over on angels.

"Is your cat the Kyriotate, or a reliever?"

Leo came back from the kitchen with two bottles of beer, and set one down in front of me. "Neither," he said. "Always looks like that." He glanced over. "Okay, either that's the cat, or that's Nik. I think the expression is about the same right now."

"So your cat looks that angry even when there's not an angry Kyriotate inside it."

He sat down across from me. Ikea chair, probably an Ikea coffee table. Unathi would have considered it all very...uneducated. My teacher's students knew to buy quality furniture that would last, if they meant to inhabit a Role for very long. I would've expected better of Trade.

He still looked like a Malakite. But he hadn't stabbed me yet, so he had to be the Ofanite everyone said he was.

"My cat," he said, "probably has a rich inner life that involves being angry at me all the time. I don't ask. Do you want to stick with that vessel?"

I took the beer he'd offered me. Something very ordinary from Sam Adams, which probably meant it was the kind of beer he kept around for guests. It wasn't what he was drinking. And--if he wanted to drug or poison me, there wasn't much I could do about it. "Do you want me to change?"

"Do whatever you like," he said. "Some people have strong vessel preferences." He slid down a little in his chair, without it looking like a slouch. He was, it seemed, the sort of person who could put his feet up on the coffee table and still look ready to bolt out the patio door and over the balcony at a split second's notice. "So what's your name?"

"Taylor," I said.

"Really."

"It's my name _now_."

"By right of possession?" He titled his beer my way, then had a swig. "Fair enough. What happened to the other Taylor?"

I drank from my bottle to cover for not knowing how to answer. The truth was unlikely to go over well, but I didn't know how much he'd picked up on his trip to be able to call me on my lies. He had been...not sure, I decided, not _entirely_ sure, of who I was, until we were in that office. If I'd just managed to play confusion and indignation better, I might've been able to pull off the con long enough to get a chance to run. Unless he'd really known, and I was misreading. I hated not knowing. It was like one of those hidden tests all over again, where I wasn't sure what the right answer was, but I was absolutely sure that I wouldn't like the correction if I got my answers wrong.

"He's dead," I told him. "Are you going to kill me?"

"Do you really think I would bring you to my _apartment_ to kill you?"

"It would depend on how you were going to do it. Your Kyriotate rides people on the police force. You could get away with anything." The Essence use wasn't comfortable, but I went ahead and swapped vessels. My usual one was much better for looking small and worried. This was accurate, but also a good look for evoking a little pity. Angels were supposed to do stupid things for pity, sometimes, if they weren't Malakim or War or any number of other rigid types who would as soon kill a demon as look at one. "You could have a tarp over there--"

"I'm not that attached to the rug," he said dryly, which probably meant I'd pushed too hard and fast. "But you'll note I haven't stabbed anyone yet."

Unlike me. I drew a knee up to my chest, and laced my fingers around it. "If they catch up with me," I said, letting my voice go thin and higher, "they'll do worse than that."

"And you think I won't."

"No," I said, "you _wouldn't_. You're not the sort of person who would do that."

"Well," he said, "we'd all like to think so." The cat leapt down from the bookcase, and stalked into his lap. That must've been the Kyriotate showing up, and Leo was right: it still stared at me just as angrily as before. "And since this apartment isn't run as a democracy, I say that as long as you can behave yourself, no one around here is going to kill you."

I pulled my other knee up to my chest. I didn't really want beer anyway. "How far does 'around here' go?"

"Me. Nik. Olivia, though that probably goes without saying. The Seneschal... I'm going to have a longer talk with. But if she's been willing to let the locals go unmolested for these centuries, she's unlikely to drop on your head now."

"Does the Seneschal have a name?"

"Yes," he said. He scratched the cat behind its ears, and it purred while glaring at me. Definitely the Kyriotate. "What's your goal here, Taylor? What did you expect to do after spending two weeks pretending to work off dissonance?"

I didn't think he was going to take "wing it" as a suitable answer, or even believe that, no matter how close it was to the truth. It wasn't a question I had a good answer for. _Any_ answer for. An old friend gave me a hint, I ran, and...what else was I supposed to do? Wait for Unathi to catch up with me? Ask that whiny Mercurian for help, when he demonstrably couldn't maintain basic social bonds already?

Multiple seconds had passed since his question, and I was still frozen up, and he was still _waiting_. He couldn't really be an Ofanite. An Elohite, pretending to be something else to get people off their guard. Not with that kind of waiting for me to crack, when I was just trying to figure out what answer he really wanted.

"I meant to keep running," I said. "I thought they would back off, and go away, if the trail led them here. Or that maybe they'd never follow me this far."

"I'm not willing to count on that. So. New plan. What do you intend _now_?"

"You just don't let up," I said, chin on my knees.

"Wouldn't say that was one of my defining traits, no." He laid a hand on the back of the cat-Kyriotate, while its ears flattened. How was I supposed to Charm angels? It wasn't fair. "I can't help you unless I know what you're trying for."

"I want to stay _alive_ ," I said. "And I don't want to go back to working for--" I was not about to reveal too many details about my teacher in front of him. I didn't want anyone pitching me back out as too much of a risk. "--her," I finished, and wondered if he'd caught the hesitation. "What's that going to cost me?"

"Tell me who's coming after you," he said dryly, "and I'll check our rates." The cat lashed a tail across his lap. "Metaphorically. Trade may be flexible, but we don't actually have a demon-harboring rate table."

"So how do you know what to charge me?"

"I wing it," he said. "Who's coming after you?"

"My old teacher." I buried more of my face behind my knees. "She's a Knight of Gluttony, and she has a few students. Mostly gremlins."

"Unlike you."

"I _graduated_." My chin jerked up without my quite meaning to. "She was supposed to let me go, and instead she kept me around. Like I might as well still be a demonling and not anyone real."

It was like the truth. Unathi was never going to let me go, no matter how advanced I got, or how far away from it I happened to be working, on the corporeal or back in Hell. Its students sent letters and presents and stopped by for reunions, and there was no _end_ to the connection, no matter where I went or what I did, not so long as we worked for the same Prince.

And I was so tired of Gluttony. It didn't go anywhere.

"A Knight and two demonlings shook down a bar full of Outcasts and Renegades." He hooked an arm over the back of his chair. "Rounding down, I gather. Do you want to make any amendments?"

"One's probably a Shedite by now." I folded my hands down over the tops of my knees, like an extra barrier between us. He had to be an Elohite, or he would feel more sorry for me by now. I was on the run from people who wanted to kill me, and I'd done all the work the Seneschal gave me even though I didn't have any dissonance, and Trade was _supposed_ to be willing to cut deals. "The other one's a Djinn. They started as demonlings."

"Tough kids."

"They're more scared of her than anyone standing in her way."

"People generally aren't scared of Trade," he said, and stood up abruptly. The cat he set down where he'd been sitting. "Different interaction paradigm than some of the Words, by and large. I need to think about this one, so I'm going for a walk."

"What about me?"

"You're staying here," he said, and tossed me a TV remote. "Don't set the place on fire, okay? I'd be annoyed. You can relax for a few hours. No one's been following you to this place."

"How do you know?"

"Educated guess," he said, and left, right like that. Not so much as a goodbye or a parting threat.

The cat leapt past me onto the back of the couch, then up to the top of the bookcase, where it could glare at me again. I made a rude gesture at it before remembering that it was probably still the Kyriotate, who was probably reporting on me to Leo, who was _probably_ an Elohite, even though I didn't know anymore.

I left the couch to look around the apartment, because even if a Hive was watching me, they wouldn't expect any better of me. There were a lot of books and a few DVDs, and that slightly too-clean feeling that residences inhabited by celestials got a lot of the time. Humans collected junk just by living, and piled it up in corners, unless they went deliberately modernist chrome or the like. Celestials bought what they needed, and then what they wanted, and then a few things to make their Role look solid.

He had a well-stocked kitchen, leftovers in the fridge, and not a dirty utensil to be found. I carried the leftovers and a fork to the table, and I had polished off most of it before I really thought about what I was doing. It wasn't like there was anything showing on TV that could take my mind off things, and some stress responses were just...habitual. The kind of habits my teacher had drilled into me, because, as it always said, good habits kept a person making reasonable decisions in the midst of crisis. Maybe not the optimal decisions, but if the habits were right, they at least wouldn't be terrible panic responses.

I wasn't sure how eating the Ofanite's food was supposed to help me, but it did make me feel slightly better.

"Do you want any?" I asked the cat on the bookshelf. It glared back at me. "...I'll just clean up, then."

I washed my dishes. Dried them. Put them away. Whatever Leo decided to charge me for whatever help he was willing to provide, I wasn't about to rack up cleaning bills on top of that. I was prepared to be the absolute perfect houseguest if it could get me a discount.

I sat back down on the couch, right where the cat could stare at me easily, and tried to figure out how to make him like me when I couldn't Charm him or pretend to be someone entirely unlike myself. It wasn't supposed to be hard. Being likable was what Impudites did, and I'd done so well at it every time before.


	16. In Which I Get Into A Fight

Nik is waiting for me outside, with her own car. She hands me the keys without speaking.

"Look," I say, "I know exactly what you're going to say, and you're not wrong, but that's not the sum of it. This isn't some clear-cut situation where I can just fall back on the employee handbook, which does not, let me point out, actually have an explicit rule for this kind of event, or I would be following it already."

I get into the driver's side of her car. She takes the other seat, and slams the door shut behind her.

"More to the point, I wasn't sure about anything until we were in that lobby talking about it, so it's not like I could clue you in early. Unlike you, I can only be in one place at a time."

"Sometimes you're a real asshole, Leo," Nik says, and pulls on her seatbelt.

I turn on the engine, and take us out somewhere. I'd rather be walking. But some conversations are easier to have in cars that on sidewalks.

"It's like you don't trust me," Nik says, half a mile away. Her fingers hold onto the armrest to her left as if she's trying not to reach toward me. "I follow your lead, don't I? All you would have to say is, hey, there's a possibility this Mercurian is actually an Impudite, but don't get violent about it or let on. Do you think I'm not capable of that?"

"I think you still serve the Sword, and I don't want to put you in an awkward position."

"Or you could trust me enough to let me figure out when that's the case." She smacks the heel of her hand against the dashboard. "How can I protect you if you won't tell me what's going on?"

"It was a _suspicion_ , Nik--"

"And that's still information!" She turns her hand over to look at the mark on her palm. Not even in spitting distance of dissonance, if this were a host, but it's her own dedicated vessel and Role. Some human died, and she took over their life to give this identity a chance to be all it could have been. It doesn't help the soul of the dead human much, so I've never been quite sure why the Sword picks these not-hosts for its Kyriotates so carefully, but that's the Sword for you. They care an awful lot about rules. More than Judgment does, in some ways.

"Nik," I say, "I spend half the day thinking of ways I might be wrong about--nearly everything. For once, I was right that I had been wrong before. If I sit there feeding you every doubt I have we're both going to spin in circles, and you'll be jumping at shadows."

"Sometimes there's a demon in the shadows," Nik says. "I want warning. I want you to trust me. This isn't a matter of ordering too many paperclips, it's the identity of someone we invited into the Tether and--God, Leo, sent out to spend time with Olivia!"

"Under supervision, because even if this were an Outcast Mercurian, relievers don't spend time alone with those, either."

"You're going to argue me in circles," Nik says tightly, while I keep my eyes on the empty roads. "That's what you're good at. I've never once in my life won an argument with you."

"Whether or not I was right. I know. Sometimes I'm an asshole."

"Is that likely to change?"

"I don't know," I say, and take another turn. "It's not like angels can't be great angels and terrible people." There aren't many lights on but streetlights and fast food drive-in signs, at this hour. One more hour and places will start waking up for the dawn crowd. Bakeries and coffee shops. Traditionally, you're supposed to find Traders clustering around the latter. Something about the Renaissance in Western Europe, I think; history's not my field, and Trade doesn't do tradition the way the Sword or War do. Tradition is just something a lot of people there enjoyed for a few decades until other people in the Word grew up expecting it.

"I've wondered," Nik says, "if Eli had the right idea. Backing away from Heavenly politics and the whole grand War to focus on the corporeal. If that's what he's actually doing. Because I don't think that demons are what we ought to focus on, when there are all those humans out there in need of help. And at the same time, I look at a demon like him--like her, I suppose, and I just don't _know_. If we back off and give her space to make the right decision, what happens when we're wrong?"

"The same kind of thing that happened when Iris was wrong about me." We sit at a red light just before the bridge, with no one crossing. Once upon a time I would have run through the light, because what's the point? Right this minute, I have nothing against doing so as a matter of principle; I just don't feel it's necessary. The place I need to be is in this car with Nik. Where the car is, and how fast it gets there, are secondary considerations. "I did a lot of terrible things."

"And good things."

"And terrible things. We're complicated like that. Even the people I've hated the most were still complicated, whether I could see that or not. Maybe they were just made up of different variants of evil, but there's still that--variation. You never know everything about a person, no matter what your resonance is."

The light changes, and I take the bridge. There's a strong wind pushing clouds across the sky, and the bridge has that slight shiver of structurally appropriate flex. Build things too rigid, and under pressure they snap. The Sword could stand to learn something about that. Maybe they ought to ask Stone to lend them a few modern architects, and see if it helps.

But then, Stone doesn't seem to understand that either.

I suppose they're far more nuanced from the inside than I can grasp from the outside. Never really had much incentive to try to look further than the surface, with that Word.

"I don't actually have to explain it to anyone," Nik says softly. She's staring out the window, when I glance her way. "They sent me here to keep you safe, and maintain this Role, and do what you ask me to. In that order. If you tell me to do something I think is idiotic, I'll still do it, right up until I think it's going to get you killed, and I'm _allowed_ to do that."

"They should've given you more freedom of action."

"I have the right amount of freedom of action. And this way, you can--do these sorts of things. Without worrying about compromising me in some way."

There are a lot of things I could say about that, which I won't, because I don't want to upset Nik more. She has some good points. And why can't I just let her win an argument, once in a while? Especially when she's more right than I am?

But she wouldn't be any happier with me _letting_ her win.

"I'm giving her a chance," I say instead. "Executive decision. One good chance to act like a reasonable person who doesn't deserve being flung back into Hell, because it's not like letting the people chasing her have their way does much good for our side either, speaking pragmatically for a moment."

"Let's not go being pragmatic, now," Nik says. "Isn't that what Elohim do?"

"Shifty bastards. Let's not emulate them after all."

"No," Nik says, stretching her arms overhead, until her knuckles brush against the low roof of the car. "Let's emulate someone else. A Seraph with remarkable patience."

I pull the car over to a quiet parking spot behind a diner. "There are worse role models."

"Just because it worked on you doesn't mean it's going to work on anyone else, you know."

"I'm an outlier, not unique." I turn off the engine, and rest my arms on the steering wheel for a moment. "Should I give other people less of a chance than I got?"

"Yes," Nik says. She smiles wanly at me. "You won't, but you _should_. Are we taking a look at that warehouse tonight?"

"That's the plan, if you can spare a Force to watch my back."

"I could watch your back from this body once in a while. Opposable thumbs. Firearms."

I get out of the car, and toss the keys back to her. "Great things, but right now excellent night vision is more what I need. Your Role doesn't have any reason to skulk around, and there may be cameras I haven't spotted."

"Your Role doesn't have any skulking reason either--"

"--and it's paper-thin and replaceable, if it comes to that. Executive decision, Nik. Stick to scouting for me unless I'm about to get shot. Stabbed. Whatever."

"Kidnapped?"

"Yeah, let's avoid that one." I lean back into the car to kiss her on the cheek. "I know, I take advantage of your abilities shamelessly, but given all the times I sat around in Theft wishing I had a Kyriotate handy, can you blame me?"

#

Nik has acquired the same owl as before, or a nearly identical one, to be my spotter while I check over the warehouse. There's nothing to bring me back here but an uneasy feeling and a desire to do something other than go back to my apartment. I mean--yes, there's a demonling skulking around watching for intruders, which means there's something going on here, but the world is large and demons get up to a lot of things. It is not actually my job to tackle every baby demon I run into and demand an accounting of their purposes.

Just the ones who walk into my Tether first.

It's not _my_ Tether, just the one I'm watching out for at the moment. Temporary posting, if potentially "temporary" in that Heavenly sense that has me doing thirty years here and discreetly retiring my Role before I get a long-term job. But is periphery is mine, temporarily or otherwise, as much as its heart and locus are the Seneschal's. She takes care of the metaphysics: I take care of the property rights and employee payroll and all those things that a Kyriotate who generally prefers being a freshwater shark does not want to spend her time on.

For instance, breaking into suspicious warehouses to find out if the demonic presence there is just passing through, or setting up camp on our doorstep.

I don't have most of my gear with me, though at Nik's silent insistence I've brought along her gun. Most nights I would argue that I don't need to shoot anyone, and if I did, would she really want it traced back to her service piece? Even if cops can get away with a fair amount of shooting random people in this area, human authorities ask some questions if you were in strange places while off-duty at the time of the incident. Tonight I took what she suggested, and I'm taking the whole examination slowly.

The upper windows are dark, reflecting back the pale yellow of the street light and nothing else. Rather than take the same route as last time, I skirt around the perimeter, looking over the grounds. Under-used, but not unused. Dirt and scraps of trash have their own patterns from the usual winds in the city, given street layout and where the buildings lie, if a place is undisturbed, and the concrete around the warehouse has a slightly different spread. Vehicles have come through, probably not as often as foot traffic.

I crouch down, in shadows by the fencing, and contemplate the edges of the loading bay door. Sealed tight, but it's not exactly an airlock, there. The gray edges tell me there's contained light behind them. Nothing that made it up to the windows. Chances that the demonling on guard has a night-light: pretty fucking low. So for once, there's someone inside, and it's not our friendly neighborhood drug dealers, who are not so security-conscious as to show up on foot and seal the doors behind them. Especially at this hour. In my admittedly limited experience, marijuana is not the kind of drug that people pass around shortly before dawn, though god knows what the cartels are up to these days. And this is not cartel work.

I should really request one of those North American security reports from the Sword, the next time I'm in Heaven. Going on experience and rumor only gets me so far. But the human world is surprisingly big for a place that's only one planet, and there's a lot going on. I can't keep track of everything.

Nik lands at the top of the fence, and turns her head sideways to peer down at me with one owl eye.

"Demons," I say. "Call it a sixty-percent chance. Or maybe just the one."

She watches, without implied commentary. Except that maybe the implied commentary is that I should just tell her what I'm doing, and let her follow, instead of being coy about it. Maybe she's right about that.

"I _mean_ to just take a look," I say, "but we'll see how it goes. Back me up, and let's try to get this done without anything exploding." Which should be relatively simple, as I have no easy way of making things explode anymore. Movies wildly overestimate the ease of creating giant billowing walls of fire with nothing better than gasoline, and what I have in my pockets does not include that.

Mind, you can do a lot with gasoline. You just need to put some effort into it.

A second sweep of the area doesn't give me a better entrance option, at least not on this level of examination, than the same window as before. So I turn myself shadow and transparent--or at least translucent, depending on the eyesight of the people looking my way--and take that route again. It's easier the second time. Nothing trapped, at least that I'm able to detect, in the way of alarms.

I lean over the railing from the catwalk up top, and peer down at the warehouse floor, where three people are having a quiet, intense conversation.

It's all reference and inside knowledge. Not informative, except to tell me that these three know each other reasonably well, at least in the context of what they're discussing. Two men, one woman, and we're not counting the demonling skulking around in the background. Now. Do I have one full-grown demon, or three? Three is enough to raise some red flags. Putting aside Theft, which loves its packs of rabble-rousing kids, and the War, which travels in groups large enough to have official hierarchies, three demons mean a _project_ in a way one doesn't. Even if it's just one demon about my size and two seven-Force kids.

That would be the composition of the people coming after Taylor, if she's telling anything close to the truth. Allowing visual shift for the Shedite taking on another host, we'd still need at least one of the people below to have multiple vessels for these three to match the description I got at the bar. We'll call it possible, but not probable.

I really hope it's not three demons. I'd have to call that damn Malakite.

My Song's holding out for a good long time, tonight. I rest my elbows on the railing, and try to work out the dynamics below. The woman's built like my ex-girlfriend, though she's got the wrong kind of haircut and expressions for me to _really_ worry in that direction. Tall, elegant, with a certain fluidity of motion that implies Balseraph inhabitation without absolutely shouting it. She's clearly in charge, so unless I'm wrong, and these are all humans, that's one demon. Even if I have her Band misidentified.

The two men are harder to work out. One of them's playing second in command to the woman, at her elbow and more aggressive. Fists like a bruiser without the shoulders to match. He leans in a lot, trying to push in the space of man number two, who's centimeters taller and...arguing with both of them, actually. Even if he's phrasing every sentence so that he's not contradicting anyone.

Arguing, and losing. Neither of them take him very seriously. The smallest, or a human, or _the_ human, in this group. The topic at hand isn't as important as the fact that he's trying to take a stand on it, and failing.

The bruiser's leaning turns into an open-handed shove. Nothing so fast as the start of a fight: just proving that he can do it. The taller man jerks a hand towards his jacket, and away, and oh, that was a bad decision, kid. Don't you know anything about working with demons?

A demon would've known better. Either don't make the move, or follow through. You're either subservient or you're confident, you can't _waffle_ , that's blood in the water.

Like I was ever good at following that rule.

The woman whips forward, grabs the taller man by the throat, and takes him right down to the ground with a knee to the gut. That's gotta hurt. It also distracts me from my attempt to work out likely Bands for the two men. (I hadn't even narrowed it down particularly. Neither of them is throwing off obvious signs.) She kneels on the man who's cowering down there, and says to the bruiser, "Give me your gun."

Helltongue usage _does_ narrow down some of the other possibilities noticeably.

I leap over the railing, and land on my feet. Lightly enough to not stumble, maybe not perfectly. It's probably a move I should practice more. A rat scuttles across the floor toward my ankle. Nik would probably be chewing me out for not just taking the damn stairs, if she were in here with her vessel right now.

"It's a waste of resources," the bruiser says, a mild kind of protest, and takes out a pistol to offer to her. "And noisy."

"I haven't decided yet," says the woman, "but I'm tired of complaints. Sometimes you just have to do the job yourself if you want it to be done properly."

"The phrase," I say, letting the Song release around me, "is more often 'If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.'" The words feel a lot stranger on my tongue than they used to. But it's the truth, which is an absolutely crucial point to stick to when speaking my old native language these days. Just forming the sentences in my head can make my bones start to ache, like something is about to vibrate right out of tune. "You're not from around here, are you."

They're looking for reinforcements before I'm on the fourth word, but Nik's out of sight. It's just me. I smile at them, all teeth.

"Do the locals spend a lot of time getting into the business of people they have no business getting involved in?" asks the maybe-Bal, who is, I think, not a wordsmith.

"Depends on how you define 'a lot'." I wave the matter off. The gun's still not pointed at me, though it should be. "He hasn't learned Helltongue yet?"

"He's not even a Soldier," says the bruiser, "just some guy."

"Who doesn't know how to take orders," says the Bal. She rests the barrel of the gun against the man's forehead. "So if I had to guess about what sort of person you are, I would be guessing that you're an Impudite."

"Wow." I shove my hands into my pockets. "That's--okay, maybe I should really wonder about my own presentation when no one is getting this right on the first guess."

"Then what do you _want_?" demands the bruiser. Djinn? Calabite? Doesn't seem the Habbalite type, and Impudite is clearly right out. Shedite's always an outside bet if the vessel isn't working for any of the other types, but those are just tendencies, and he doesn't talk like any Shedite I've met so far.

"Good question. So, cards on the table, and let's talk." I sit down on a crate that's likely full of something illegal, and possibly full of something explosive. That always keeps things exciting. "I'm from the Tether down the road, and you're threatening to get noisy. We'd rather you don't. How about you?"

"You don't look like Tech," the bruiser says.

"Shut up and let me do all of the talking to him," says the Balseraph, drawing up straighter. She's not tiny, that much I'm sure of. Even Bals, who love to project a confidence they don't have, don't stand like that at seven Forces if they think they're speaking to another demon who has corporeal work and who hasn't backed down. "One death won't shake your stupid Tether, and we're practically on your side."

"Fire or the War?" I ask, and keep an eye on the man on the ground. Peripheral vision, really. He's gone paler and damper under stress, but he can keep his mouth shut.

I wonder if he's already damned or not. Never did follow the details of those things well; it's more a Destiny thing than what Trade deals in. Personal responsibility, plus society-scale systems. Individual redemption isn't our gig.

"Fire," says the Bal, chin lifting. She's proud of the Word she serves, and doesn't quite expect me to feel the same way. Fire has its own reputation in Hell. Usually not the kind that gives other Words a lot of respect for their long-term planning abilities, which is slightly unfair, in much the way Theft doesn't have a reputation for being subtle and cautious. "You're really Tech? What, you just want us to take this guy further away before we end up shooting him and making disturbance that would be a problem for Tech?"

I could dodge that question. But I'm not trying to play a long game with these two. Three? Two, really. I'm not playing any game at all with the human.

"Trade," I say, and swap back to English rather than try to render some statements elegantly in a language full of pitfalls. "The Tech Tether is how far away? One murder won't shake that. Trade's right down the road."

The gun finally points at me. I'd critique their decision-making process and technique, but I'm probably not supposed to give demons pointers on how to do their jobs better. The personal satisfaction doesn't balance well against the potential that they might actually serve Hell _better_.

Being in a silent war is very strange at times.

"Right," I say, and clap my hands together. "We are all on the same page! Great. So, back to my first point. I left you alone until now because you were being reasonably subtle, but murders are right out. You need to either get a lot quieter, or gone."

"You and what army?" asks the bruiser, the corners of his mouth starting to turn up. It's a pity his partner doesn't let him do the talking.

"Hey, don't get me wrong." I let my foot tap against the crate I'm sitting on. "I'm not just asking nicely. It's a fair warning. But we can keep this on the pleasant side, where you happen to discover a security breach and decide on your own that it's time to move along, or we can do this the less fun way where it's all exploding warehouses and people in Trauma and some people who _don't_ do Trauma jumping back as often as necessary to stab anyone left standing." I am trying not to let my smile go all shark-like, and I'm not sure I'm succeeding. At least it's not roguish enough to make me look like Valefor. "I don't like waves of disturbance, but I don't _dislike_ it so much that I'm going to pretend we never met, if things go poorly. Our Tether's been standing a few centuries. It can cope."

"If you were really a Malakite," says the Balseraph, and I'm pretty sure she's resonating herself with this one, "you wouldn't just be talking. You'd already be trying to kill us."

"Wrong on the second point, but I'm not a Malakite. We try to keep those on shorter leashes." I stop my foot from tapping against the crate, and fold my hands over a knee. "Do you want to deal?"

"He can't be a Malakite," says the bruiser, quietly, "because he speaks Helltongue."

"It can be taught," I point out.

"But what Malakite would learn that?"

"Do you actually spend a lot of time thinking about what Malakim would do?"

"Yes," he says.

"Huh. Well. Points for effort and forethought, then."

"Are you arguing that you are or aren't a murderous blackwing who's going to murder all of us?" the Balseraph demands. "Because either way, we're not complying with your threats!"

"I haven't made any threats yet," I say, and glance at the bruiser. "Back me up here."

"You sort of intimated some," he says.

"Yeah, fair." I turn my smile back on the Bal. "So! Do you want me to issue detailed threats? Or do you want to keep things fucking quiet around here? Because I have a job to do, and I prefer that it not include dealing with Fire. Malakite squads are kinda pricy to keep on retainer, and they make a mess wherever you toss them."

"You're already dealing--" the bruiser begins, quite reasonably, but the Balseraph snaps, "Shut _up_." And that he does comply with.

I wait.

"I could shoot you," the Balseraph says.

"From that distance?"

"An easy target!"

"No, it's..." I take a breath. Okay, yes, we may as well go here. "You're inside the range where using a gun isn't nearly as effective, because I can close faster than you can complete your whole firing action."

"That's really not true when the gun's already pointed at you," the bruiser says. "Maybe if she were about to draw. Or if you were a few yards closer."

I wiggle my fingers at him. "Ofanite."

He swears in Helltongue. I think I'll take that as a compliment.

The human on the floor remains dead quiet. Smart man, if not smart enough to avoid getting involved with Hell in the first place, or to avoid arguing with them once he was there.

"In any case." I pull out a pack of cigarettes, and take one for myself before waving the pack at the demons. The Balseraph looks more paranoid at every moment, and the bruiser just looks more...thoughtful? They're both trouble, in different directions. Not sure yet if their work together makes them more dangerous or if they'll cancel each other out. After their refusals, I toss a cigarette over to the man on the floor, who's dared to sit up and wait quietly while celestials get business done around him. "How do you see this playing out?"

"He could be with the Game," the bruiser says quietly.

I light my cigarette. Cheap disposable lighter, because I don't actually care to keep fancy ones around. Bad memories there. But sometimes having an emergency reserve of lighter fluid in an innocuous container can be handy. "Pretty sure the Game doesn't do sting operations on perfectly legit Firebugs," I say, and wing the lighter over after the cigarette. The human tosses it back when he's done. Good aim. "If you've been up to anything that'd catch their wrath, it's escaped me so far."

"How _did_ you find us?" The Balseraph draws herself up straighter, and if she could actually turn an elegant phrase, she'd remind me of my ex-girlfriend all over again. But I'm not that much of a sucker for the Band on its own account. "You expect us to believe that for no good reason a certain angelic Tether that isn't even right here has gone ahead and been snooping around and just happened to show up at the exact moment that disturbance might occur--"

"Kyriotates," I say. The cigarette glows nicely between my fingers. I smile at them just as nicely. It's a warm fuzzy feeling all around. "You know. Seneschals? Big Kyriotates? Lots of Forces, not a lot to do but run constant surveillance on the area?"

The bruiser says something rude and quite specific in Helltongue.

"Look," I say, "you keep dodging the question, which is fair, because who likes running on nothing but an implied threat? But this is the last call. You're not set up for permanent residence. Take advantage of that mobility, and go."

"What makes you believe that we don't in fact have all sorts of permanent installations available to us here already?" asks the Balseraph.

"No security system on the windows--that's not even a mark of inhabitation, you run the wires and people can assume it's from a previous client--and not enough awareness of the locals, just to start with. You should've given your demonling a vessel. I mean, seriously, pick up a rat vessel for the kid, they're _cheap_ , and how often do you think a passing Malakite is going to resonate a harbor rat, compared to someone noticing a demonling in celestial form is hovering around a warehouse?" I tap ash off my cigarette. "...good job on the human cover, though. I probably would've stopped by sooner if that weren't confusing the issue."

"Are you lecturing us on security basics?" asks the bruiser.

"Bad habit. Sorry." I point the lit end of my cigarette at him. "Are you leaving?"

He swaps a glance with the Balseraph. I've had partners I could do that with; sometimes it's true with Nik, too. One expression from each, see who backs down, known opinions, and then the person in charge delivers the verdict.

"Our business here was practically concluded at this point in any case," says the Balseraph loftily.

"Great." I stand up, and grind out the remains of my cigarette on the floor. "I'll give you some space. Nice meeting you."

What's sort of tragic, in its own way, is that the last line is true. They were a decent distraction, and while I'm not quite ready to stamp this whole situation resolved, it went better than one might expect.

I leave by the loading bay door, and amble across the lot. Nik lands on my shoulder before I'm out of the reach of the light from the door. Proof to the demons, who I would assume are watching me leave, that I meant it about the Kyriotate surveillance around here.

"Opinions?" I ask her, but she only hoots noncommittally.

Back at the car, she hands me a hot chocolate in a to-go cup, and we sit on the trunk together for a few while I drink that.

"So," she says, at last. She has coffee. She's playing a cop: of course she drinks coffee.

"Better than even odds that I saved someone's life," I say. The hot chocolate's too sweet and not thick enough. There are better diners than this one. "Someone who's working for Hell, with some degree of knowing that. So does that put me ahead or behind, ethically speaking?"

"It would depend," Nik says, "on whether you asked Flowers or War."

"Yeah." I lean back on one hand, and stare up at the stars. Clouds cover most of them, but here and there patches break through, even against the pre-dawn city lights. "If everyone could predict the consequences of their actions, the war would've ended before it began."

Nik says nothing, but sips her coffee.

I give up on the ethical dilemmas for the night. I'm never going to be perfectly correct. It's like my Archangel said: I will fuck up some things. Then I fix them. That's life.

He said it more elegantly than that.

I slide off the trunk, and take the keys from Nik. "So tell me honestly. Do I look like an Impudite to you?"

"No?" She follows me back into the car.

"Mercurian?"

"Mercurians wear colors, Leo."

"So it's just other people being lousy at guessing," I say. "I can work with that."


	17. An Interlude, In Which A Demonstration Of Infernal Cooperation Occurs

Marija had the situation entirely under control when she gave Arzu the signal to back down. _Entirely_ under control, plus or minus some battle damage, but she had already lost that worthless watchdog of a gremlin and had no desire to see her Calabite go next. 

Of course Arzu would never run away, as the gremlin had. And if he did, he would have a plan for coming back and helping her with the situation (which was clearly under control) and would certainly avoid being torn to pieces in celestial form by a Shedite who had just exited a thoroughly damaged host. Only a six-Force idiot would get into a situation like that. She could hardly be held responsible for poor decision-making on the part of her least valuable, and now distinctly former, subordinate.

She was being held by the throat, which made hand gestures the only real means of indicating it was time to try a more diplomatic solution to the confrontation. How fortunate and prescient of her to have come up with some basic signals for these kinds of commands earlier.

Arzu detached from his brawl the moment he saw her gesture. He was _worth_ keeping around, unlike some people she'd dealt with, and not only because he knew how to find the best markets for their usual stock. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and stepped a cautious two steps away from the woman whose shoulder his teeth had been attached to a moment earlier.

"An excellent choice," said the one who held Marija by the throat. "Some people do learn to make better decisions when they're given new data on the situation."

Marija decided that this was not the time to indicate how condescending she felt this statement was, though certainly she would tell the demon so at some point in the future. Fire knew how to bide its time, banked coals waiting for the right moment to catch flame again. As a wise old Djinn had once told her, not _all_ problems were best dealt with via flamethrower. That was how he had become a wise _old_ Djinn, rather than a famous heroic one. Most stories were told about interestingly dead Servitors of Fire, in that classroom.

"Sorry for the misunderstanding," Azru said, and sounded almost sincere. Unlike her, he was an excellent liar. "Nothing against your people, if you're not walking across our business."

The demon holding Marija set her down on the ground, but left a hand on her shoulder. It made her feel like biting as well, but that hadn't worked ideally on the last attempt, and she had _everything_ under control. The plan did not currently call for violence. She had made her point adequately on that Shedite's host.

"It's bleeding out," said the demon who had been fighting Azru. "Should I stabilize it?"

"I'm not wearing that again," said the Shedite. "Should I find a new one, or stick around?" She turned several eyes towards Azru, despite his placid stance. Some demons were so paranoid after the slightest hint of conflict.

"Stabilize it before it adds to the disturbance," said the demon who was clearly in charge of the others. "And find a new host, Quinta. There's no danger here." 

Of course that would be the one to confront her directly. Marija swallowed, avoiding any visible wince at what that felt like, and wondered if that woman was a Balseraph as well. Her own Band could be the most reasonable to deal with, given a few points of common interest.

"My name is Unathi," said the one in charge. Her expression was much like the one Azru wore when dealing with Soldiers, and that was--inappropriate, not at all how she _deserved_ to be treated by another demon who happened to have brought more violent subordinates along, but of course there was no reason to go into matters of civility around people who were clearly incapable of being civil. "And you three?" This Unathi looked over to where the remains of the gremlin were fading out of existence, as celestial corpses tended to do in the corporeal world. "You two."

Her Calabite came to stand at her left side, a pace back, exactly where he was supposed to. "I am Marija," she said, "and this is Azru. We serve Fire. Why did you attack us?"

"The question," Unathi said, seating herself on a crate of _their_ stock, as if she had rights to such a thing, "is why you're here, when my information placed you in a city two hours away, at a rather larger facility."

"We own this place too," Marija said.

"Not legally. Though that's rather beside the point, mortal authorities being what they are." Unathi paused as something scraped at the door of the storage unit. The small one, suitable for people carrying crates in a discreet manner, as opposed to the one for driving cars through. "Do let Quinta back inside," she said to her subordinate, and that demon left the unconscious human on the floor to open the door with bloody hands.

"Your information was out of date," Azru said. He really need to leave the talking to her, but she couldn't fault him for trying to help.

"No," Unathi said. "You arrived here this morning. What sent you running from that city?" She took a handkerchief out and offered it to the bloody-handed demon, without looking away from Marija.

"How did you know about this place?" Marija demanded. The _nerve_ of these people was impossible. As if they had any right to ask questions, when they had come into her territory, molested her merchandise, attacked her subordinates, and now--sat! On her weaponry! It would have been the final straw, and no one could hold her accountable for a disproportionate response, if that Shedite had brought in her Soldier as its latest vessel. But that idiot mortal had avoided that particular failure, so she decided to reserve judgment a little longer. Or, well. To judge them all terribly rude, but reserve vengeance for a more opportune moment.

"You seem to be under the impression that we're having a conversation," Unathi said. "This is an interrogation. If you can't answer simple questions, I'll start cutting pieces off the less useful of you until someone does."

"Can I help?" asked the Shedite.

"Quinta, we always give people a chance at the easier approach first. This is a matter of efficiency, not entertainment."

Marija was still trying to make up her mind when Azru said, "We left. One of the divine Tethers decided to start cracking down on activity in the area. Some Kyrio Seneschal that didn't like anyone near the river. It was easier to ditch and let them think we were really gone, then sell the location to people with different vessels, than get into some big fight over one warehouse."

Unathi spread her hands. "You see," she said to the Shedite, "how easy this can be." And then she accepted a bloody handkerchief back from the other demon. "And what does this give us?"

"An empty warehouse that the Trade Tether thinks has been cleared," said the demon with now cleaner hands. "Might still have it under surveillance, though."

"So they might." Unathi gestured at another crate. "Sit down, Marija. Azru. Tell me more."

Marija sat down. But only because she _meant_ to, and it would make revenge later that much more surprising. Azru sat down because she did. Everything was under control.


End file.
